In Spanish, the word is aborto, a foreign word that even I can master and pretty easy for Celia, Lynn’s mother, to yell at her a few times over the phone. “Aborto! Aborto! Clak-ata-clak-ata-clak-ata.”

Lynn called home. It was night, we were lying in bed, and I heard everything from my side. I wanted to help, but what could I do? You don’t interfere with a family. Lynn nodded into the phone, picked up a pencil and stared at it.

“Mom. We already decided.”

“Goddamn it!” I heard Celia say. “You slut. You and your jackass boyfriend.”

After two minutes, Lynn hung up. She didn’t say anything.

“Jackass boyfriend?” I said.

“She said to tell you she hates you.”

“Thanks.”

In my mind, I saw Celia stomping barefoot through her newly carpeted house with the antenna phone and her 1950s bouffant hairdo and ten pounds of eye shadow, shaking her fist, saying, “Goddamn jackass,” meaning me, blaming it on me.

LYNN AND I have a normal sex life. Whatever that means. Sex is never normal with anyone, it’s bizarre, it’s wiggly meats, but Lynn was a virgin when we met. And then a couple of months went by, and we were invited to her parents’ for Christmas.

We drove from Colorado to Ohio. It’s twenty-two hours by car. You know how it is when you go on a road trip—you’re going to a new place together. After five or six hours, the inside of the car smelled like BO; my ass began to hurt; my legs felt like concrete; there were sunflower seeds all over the floor. More miles, and soon we were spitting the shells on each other. Two o’clock in the morning, shit-bag road stop, I’m buying cigarettes in Michigan. Lynn’s standing next to me in a pink pajama top and jeans, sunflower-seed shells in her hair, which is all sticking up in knots in the back from her sleeping on it. She gave me two candy fireballs; her hand was warm and clammy. Outside, no cars passed by. It was silent. It wasn’t particularly cold for December. There was the gas station and then nothing for miles.

We stood in the unfamiliar light of the store in the middle of nowhere, lost. It was at about that time that I felt anything could happen. Me and my girlfriend, Lynn, on our first road trip together. When you’re twenty-three, a road trip is the highlight of your life. I held on to her hand. It’s the same person, and she’s great, but she seemed different all of a sudden, three-dimensional. Like a person you’ve just met for the first time and would like to get to know. As we drove off, the car went over a speed bump and out of the corner of my eye I saw Lynn’s boobs shake.