Janice says, “You look better since you stopped work. Your color is better. Wouldn’t you be happier in an outdoor job?”

“They don’t pay. Only morons work outdoors anymore.”

“I would keep working at Daddy’s. I think I should.”

“What does that have to do with me? You’re going to get an apartment, remember?”

She doesn’t answer again. Weiser is climbing too close to the mountain, to Mt. Judge and their old homes. He turns left on Summer Street. Brick three-stories with fanlights; optometrists’ and chiropractors’ signs. A limestone church with a round window. He announces, “We could buy a farm.”

She makes the connection. “Because Ruth did.”

“That’s right, I’d forgotten,” he lies, “this was her street.” Once he ran along this street toward the end and never got there. He ran out of steam after a few blocks and turned around. “Remember Reverend Eccles?” he asks Janice. “I saw him this summer. The Sixties did a number on him, too.”

Janice says, “And speaking of Ruth, how did you enjoy Peggy?”

“Yeah, how about that? She’s gotten to be quite a girl about town.”

“But you didn’t go back.”

“Couldn’t stomach it, frankly. It wasn’t her, she was great. But all this fucking, everybody fucking, I don’t know, it just makes me too sad. It’s what makes everything so hard to run.”

“You don’t think it’s what makes things run? Human things.”

“There must be something else.”

She doesn’t answer.

“No? Nothing else?”

Instead of answering, she says, “Ollie is back with her now, but she doesn’t seem especially happy.”

It is easy in a car; the STOP signs and corner groceries flicker by, brick and sandstone merge into a running screen. At the end of Summer Street he thinks there will be a brook, and then a dirt road and open pastures; but instead the city street broadens into a highway lined with hamburger diners, and drive-in sub shops, and a miniature golf course with big plaster dinosaurs, and food-stamp stores and motels and gas stations that are changing their names, Humble to Getty, Atlantic to Arco. He has been here before.

Janice says, “Want to stop?”

“I ate lunch. Didn’t you?”

“Stop at a motel,” she says.

“You and me?”

“You don’t have to do anything, it’s just we’re wasting gas this way.”

“Cheaper to waste gas than pay a motel, for Chrissake. Anyway don’t they like you to have luggage?”

“They don’t care. Anyway I think I did put a suitcase in the back, just in case.”

He turns and looks and there it is, the tatty old brown one still with the hotel label on from the time they went to the Shore, Wildwood Cabins. The same suitcase she must have packed to run to Stavros with. “Say,” he says. “You’re full of sexy tricks now, aren’t you?”

“Forget it, Harry. Take me home. I’d forgotten about you.”

“These guys who run motels, don’t they think it’s fishy if you check in before suppertime? What time is it, two-thirty.”