I did not respond at first, if only because I was confused by the request; driving a distant relation I hardly knew to a town that must have been something like two and a half hours away was a significantly greater time commitment than I had anticipated. Not that I was particularly occupied with anything meaningful, although of course I still labored under the misguided impression that my book project was well under way.

“I’m sure he’d be glad to, Evelyn,” my grandmother said then.

I was caught now, of course, and so I could only parrot her sentiment. “Sure,” I said. “Sure I’d be glad to help.”

WHEN I ASKED MRS. WILSON—I had determined to call her Mrs. Wilson now rather than Aunt Evelyn, as she was not technically my aunt and calling such a woman by her first name seemed impossible to me at that time—where exactly we were headed, she would only tell me that she was going to visit someone or that she was going to meet someone and when she seemed reticent to offer any additional information I let it drop. Much of the remainder of the drive was accomplished in silence, something of a surprise since I had assumed, for no reason other than my previous experiences in conversation with those I perceived of as adults, that I would be subjected to some manner of questioning as to my own life and my own decisions. But Mrs. Wilson said almost nothing, the most significant exchange of what was nearly six hours in the car, round trip, being a moment in which she asked if I was driving as fast as I felt comfortable.

“I can slow down,” I told her.

“No, no,” she said in response. “I thought you might go a bit faster is all.”

And so I did, speeding west along the interstate in the early morning, the freeway descending the hills and then burning in a ruler line across the Central Valley before shifting, just after the golden hills beyond, to run south along the edge of the bay. We caught occasional glimpses of the ocean and the bridge, small pleasure craft with their shining white triangles of sail taut against the endless oceanic breeze, and, beyond them, lumbering barges heading into the Port of San Francisco, its shape that of a ghost city rising from a dark gray ribbon of fog lined, on its top edge, with a stripe of pure white light that reminded me, yet again, of the smoke of my addiction. I knew I could score in that great gray metropolis and the thought of that possibility bade me break into an anticipatory full-body sweat.