She all but corralled me into the driver’s seat and slammed my door shut. She tugged at my seatbelt and handed it to me to buckle in. I knew I was beaten, so I said, “Fine, just give me the address and we’ll go.”

She gave me a strange little smile. “You know where the cabin is, baby. Just follow your nose. Don’t come back until you’re sure the time is right.”

She jerked her head slightly to the northeast, and with that as my only clue, Jules and I took off.

“Woooohooooo!” cried Jules as we drove off. “Road triiiip!”

“Don’t get too excited. I have no idea where the cabin is. There’s no way we’ll find it.”

I’d been to the cabin once with my parents when I was five or six years old. I had vague memories of it, but believe me, I had no clue how to get us there. I remembered driving for a long time to get there. A very, very long time. Thinking about it, I realized that even that memory was unreliable. I was a child. An hour or two in the car felt like an eternity at that time in my life.

“You’ll find it,” he said with total certainty.

“No, I won’t. I literally don’t know where it is. I’m planning on driving around for a while and then heading home before it gets dark.”

“Nah, you’ll find it. No one tracks better than you.”

“It’s one thing to track an animal, Jules. You can’t track a cabin no matter how good you are. That’s fucking ridiculous.”

Still, to humor him, I drove northeast. The road stretched long and straight ahead of us. The sky was big and impossibly blue. When the road forked, I headed in the direction that looked most likely to take me in the direction in which my mother had cocked her head.

Jules sang “On the Road Again” as I drove. It was clear within seconds that the only words he knew of the song were the words in the title.

“Is that the only line you know?” He threw his head back and sang loudly, confirming my suspicion. “Oh, Jesus, it is, isn’t it?” He sang it over and over until I didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry. “Look, Jules, if you keep singing that shit, I’m going to start playing The Proclaimers and I’ll play them on repeat. Don’t think I won’t.”

He laughed uproariously and sang even louder. I laughed too. I couldn’t help it. Despite the ridiculousness of our situation, it was pretty neat being on the road with Jules.