Thunk . . . thunk. The knife blade slices through salami and strikes the wood.

“Mom?”

“Alan’s going to camp.” She places three disks of salami on each roll. I feel my mouth fall open. Mom’s never let Alan go away anywhere alone before. Not even for a sleepover.

“For how long?”

She won’t look at me. “Until the end of August.”

“Why?”

“We can’t let him sit in front of the television for the whole summer, can we?”

I don’t get it. “There’s no day camp around here for kids like him?”

Thunk . . . thunk. The knife blade hits the cutting board. Finally Mom says, “It’s best this way.”

The house has three phones: one in the paterfamilias’s bedroom, one in Mom’s, and this wall phone in the kitchen. I dial zero and ask for the long-distance operator. At Camp Juliette, the person who answers says that Robin is busy with last-minute alterations to the costumes for The Wizard of Oz. Is this an emergency? I say that it’s an urgent family matter.

I’m told to hold on. While I wait, Mom asks what happened. I tell her about Odysseus.

“What about Barry?” she asks.

I tell her.

“And his friend?”

I assume she knows about Tinsley because she speaks to her sister, my aunt Jane, practically every day. “She hitched back with me.”

Mom’s forehead bunches. She must be wondering why a young woman would go with Barry most of the way to Zach’s farm in Canada, then decide to turn around and hitch all the way back with me. (I’m wondering about that, too. And part of me can’t help thinking that maybe it wasn’t so much that Tinsley wanted to be with me as that she was having second thoughts about taking off without permission. There’s also the possibility that she really does go by the I Ching, though I’m not sure that jibes with the sort of personality who could probably explain in great detail why creating corporate conglomerates maximizes profit and minimizes cyclical risk.)

After getting only four or five hours of sleep on the mattress in the field last night, we could hardly keep our eyes open on the way home. But the Hudson’s Bay salesman wanted to talk about American politics, and especially what happened last week on Martha’s Vineyard, when Senator Ted Kennedy (brother of JFK and Robert — both assassinated) drove off a bridge, and the woman (not his wife) in the car with him drowned.

“Want to know why Kennedy waited ten hours to tell the police?” the salesman said. “Because he and his cronies were busy crafting a story to cover it up.”

(They should have consulted the paterfamilias. He’s an expert in that area.)