“You’ll come back,” she said.

Still he could not raise his head to look at her.

“It won’t be so bad. Just think of it as an adventure.”

“That’s right,” Jimmy said. “We’ll keep all your stuff together. Mom and Dad said so. So don’t worry.”

“Ray?” she said now.

“What?”

“Are you even listening?”

“Sure I am,” he said.

“Well, why don’t you look at me?”

Mr. Wilson’s voice came then, a short sound across the stacked parcels and the gravel. Jimmy turned and went toward his father and then they were alone, just the two of them, still in the square with everyone else and yet alone as he hoped and feared they would be, if only for the briefest moment.

“Look at me, Ray,” Helen said.

And now he did so at long last, although it took all of his effort to keep from breaking to pieces in the process, her ankles and the bare flesh of her calves and then her legs obscured by the plaid skirt she wore and then the shape of her waist at its top, the faint swell of her breasts, her arms loose at her sides in their sleeves of white fabric. When his eyes had finished the lap of her body her gaze felt a lance or bayonet that seemed to cleave directly into his heart.

“Ray,” she said, her voice a whisper. “You won’t forget me, will you?”

“My God,” he said. “Of course I won’t. I wouldn’t. I can’t.”

“Shake my hand,” she said.

“What?”

She held her hand out to him now, suspended in the air before him. “Just do it,” she said.

He raised his hand and she clasped it as if she were concluding some business of which he was unaware. But then he felt it: a small, round object that fit into his palm, something cold and hard and smooth.

“Don’t look at it now,” she said. “Just put it in your pocket.”

The sound that came up the old highway was of the hard, high squeal of air brakes and then the rattle of a diesel engine. He realized he had been listening to the great beast roll toward them for a long while.

“They’re coming,” he said, and now his eyes went to hers.

“You’ll be all right.”

“I don’t want to go.”

“I know,” she said. Her voice was breathless, a kind of wind, a hiss.

“Raymond? Raymond?”

He looked toward where his mother stood, his father beside her, the two of them flanked by the Wilsons. Jimmy stood just a few feet away, staring in the direction of Ray and Helen.

His father called to him to find his sisters and then waved a hand.

“I’ll help,” Helen said quietly.

He could feel a pull then at her words, a tingling in his lower gut that seemed to shake through him all at once.