He didn’t ask her where she’d slept, though he’d heard she’d given up on the third-floor experiment and gone back to sleeping in the room she’d appropriated in the back of the house. Instead he asked, “You get anything to eat?”

“No. I wasn’t hungry. And the kitchen’s always such a mess—I can’t really sit down to eat if everything’s all over the place. You?”

“The whole schmear,” he said. “Coffee, black, and a cigarette.”

She laughed and then she went quiet. “Just as well,” she said after a moment. “Because I brought something along”—she patted the pocket of her cutoffs—“that really goes better on an empty stomach.”

He could have drawn back, could have thought of Dave Jacobs, Joanie, Corey, putting some money in the pot instead of living off the goodwill of everybody else, seeing to his thesis, improving the minds of the rudderless students of the Beacon School District and all the rest of the shit that was pinning him down till he felt like he was chained inside a cage sinking into the depths of a cold dark sea, but he didn’t. He just said, “You’re a real altruist, aren’t you?”

Before he knew it, the sun poked through the tops of the trees, then sprang clear of them, rising steadily till it took command of the sky. He was feeling no pain, only bliss. He watched Lori rise and dip with the motion of the boat, watched the trees dance across the shore behind her. When he felt thirsty, he leaned over, cupped his hands to the water and drank. After a time he became vaguely aware of the heat of the sun, his forearms prickling and the skin stretched tight over his face, and when she said something about it he picked up the oars and rowed them through sheaves of blistering color to the far shore, where he tied up in the shade of a willow and they both stripped down and plunged into the water. They swam. They lay in the grass. They swam. They lay in the grass. Then the wheel of the day took another turn and they wound up stretched out flat on their backs in the bottom of the boat, watching the clouds roll on overhead while the breeze took them wherever it wanted.