“Well, I knew you put a lot of shoes in there but I figured I could make enough room to sleep.”

“Well,” she said, “I’m sorry, son. But it’s 1977 and I’ve wasted too much time. I have to move on.”

Her life, as far as Ronny could remember, had consisted of little beyond her need to move on, which she announced every so often in much these terms, usually including the year, as if he did not know it. He felt an echo inside himself, as if he were hollow. But he spoke calmly. “I know you do, Mom. It’s fine. I’ll be all right.”

Now her voice took on an anxious edge, and he would have to console her. “So you can find a place to stay for the summer, can’t you?”

“I’m sure I can. Kids stay here all the time. I’ll get a job, everything will be great.”

“You can come out and see me when I get settled.”

“But I’ll have to pay for the plane ticket.”

She chortled, as if this was a foregone conclusion. “Well, you know you will. I don’t have any money.”

“Neither do I, Mom. Scholarships don’t cover plane tickets to Nevada.”

Another crack of the bat from the baseball stadium, sharp as a bullet. A wave of crowd noise, drunken. He was looking at the pile of dirty laundry in his roommate’s closet. He could smell sour beer and twice-worn socks. Opening a window, he studied the parking lot, the baseball stadium, and the diminutive players on the field, the regular bricks of Teague dorm behind a row of oaks and elms in the distance.

Mom was losing patience with the conversation—he could hear the change. She said she loved him, she said goodbye, and he sat on the bed with the spring breeze blowing through the window, the bright day mocking him. Perfectly motionless, hating the clutter of the room suddenly, he stood and gathered the pizza boxes in a stack.

So now he had no home left. Up until today he had still possessed the tiniest scrap of one, as long as he could keep up with his mother’s latest address. But now she would be in Nevada and that would be that. He dreaded the thought of finding some place to stay, given that he had almost no money, this being the end of the semester.