I tell them what I paid for Odysseus and what it would have cost to install a new engine. A long moment passes while neither agent speaks. This has to be the end, right? They didn’t find any drugs. There can’t be any other reason for keeping me here, can there?

One of the agents starts to pull on a rubber glove. “Strip.”

“What a fox! You balling her?” It’s around dinnertime. A moment ago, Arno and I dropped Tinsley beside a tall black iron gate at the entrance to a winding, tree-lined driveway in Old Westbury. The house it led to wasn’t visible from the road.

“No,” I answer. After experiencing our first-ever body cavity searches, Tinsley and I sat on a bench outside the border patrol building while agents asked passing drivers if anyone was willing to give us a ride. (By then, the couple we’d ridden with to the border was long gone.) Tinsley’s thinking of sending an account of her experience to the Ethel Walker School alumnae magazine, which is always looking for newsworthy items from graduates: Muffy Fairchild-Worthington (’68) reports that this year’s International Debutante Ball was a smashing success. Tinsley Stockton (’69) writes that she thoroughly enjoyed her first-ever body cavity search at the U.S.-Canadian border.

We wound up snagging a ride all the way to Long Island with a salesman from the Hudson’s Bay Company.

“Man, I was praying she’d invite us into the house,” Arno says in the GTO. “You know she was rich?”

“That all you can think about?” I ask. It’s been a long, frustrating twenty-four hours, and I am bushed.

Arno power-shifts into third. “Listen, Karl Marx, not everyone who’s rich got that way by exploiting the proletariat, okay? Or by selling guns and bombs.”

He’s right. I shouldn’t be giving him grief. Half an hour ago, he came to Little Neck to pick up Tinsley and me at the Scobee Diner, where the salesman had left us. Arno’s got a good heart. He’s always ready to help. When we were younger and some kids called Alan a retard, he never joined in.

I clap a hand on his shoulder. “Sorry. Thanks for coming to get us. I’m just beat.”

In the house of dashed dreams, the paterfamilias’s old green navy trunk is inside the front door. The TV is on in the den. Mom’s in the kitchen, making salami-and-Swiss-cheese sandwiches on onion rolls. The only time she makes them is when we’re going on a trip, and we haven’t gone anywhere as a family in years.

“Robin called this morning. She was quite upset.” Mom doesn’t look up from the wooden cutting board, where half a dozen golden-brown deli onion rolls lie split open, both sides smeared with French’s yellow mustard.

“What’s going on?” I ask.