Unless they learned to bite the bullet and swallow their guilt at escaping, they would grow roots to the bottom.

He awakened with a hangover the night after their last farewell party on the hill. The defendant in Roxson-Maguire had settled out of court. Within a week, they would be leaving, and it was high time: people were already asking him if he had given up the idea. He stumbled around the cabin, not wanting to wake Lindy, trying to make coffee silently and to find his business suits and shoes. He had to see Bernie this morning to sign the dissolution agreement. He struggled into his pants and shoes. It had been weeks since he had worn anything but slip-on deck topsiders or sandals.

Swelling feet: a milestone in his liberation. He slipped into the head to tie his necktie before the mirror. He had trouble with it. He was unlearning beautifully. Not even Bernie’s bleak predictions of what would happen to their firm—Bernie’s firm—dimmed his satisfaction. At the office, he told Bernie about the shoes.

“Shoes?” Bernie commented sourly. “I want my shoes to fit.”

“Come on, Bernie. Retire! The water’s fine.”

“That’s a lot of crap,” snapped Bernie. “You’re not retired. You’re working your ass off over there. Look at your fingernails, you look like a mechanic. You got to be living like a pig on that thing. I don’t see how Lindy stands it.”

Mitch declared, less than truthfully, that Lindy loved the life. Bernie asked him if their wills were up to date. Mitch thanked him wryly and told him that they were in the office safe. He asked Bernie to continue as executor.

Bernie professed that he was honored and promised to keep Tony out of the hog-belly market. “What’s he think of your abandoning him?”

Mitch’s sense of well-being fled. “Abandoning him? He’ll be twenty-one in a month! Where were you and I at twenty-one?”

“Wards of the government,” Bernie reminded him. “Lost, drunken idiots, chasing cunt whenever Uncle Sam would let us out. Safe from everything but the hazards of war. For some things, you got a mind like a sieve.” He shrugged. “He’s a sweet kid, but he’s probably still thinking with his pecker. You ought to take him along.”

“He wouldn’t go.”

“You ask him?”

“Bernie, he’s got to finish college. Or he’ll end up selling neckties!”

“Did you ask him?” persisted Bernie.

“No.”

“I figured.” Bernie snapped his fingers. “Hey, I got something for you.”

He dug into his desk. He handed Mitch a package, gift-wrapped.

Mitch found a tiny emergency radio inside, like one he had seen in Bernie’s plane. Bernie explained it: “Automatic. Flick the switch and you’re warbling on 121.5, like a nightingale in heat.”

“Surrounded,” Mitch said drily, “by circling aircraft.”