He hated my timid driving. Nervous Nelly, he called me. My brakes made a horrible grinding sound. We felt them like ragged kneecaps, bone sliding against bone. Tom didn’t have patience for people slowed by their fear—their ambivalence, or their shitty cars, or their cowardice. It’s your responsibility to figure out what you want and pursue it, he’d told me. Now I was finally driving fast and he wasn’t even awake for it.

Tom had always been strange to me. Though I sensed he felt strange to everyone. I’d seen him once with a girl in our basement. He was holding a switchblade, snapped out and gleaming, but he wasn’t hurting the girl who had her head in his crotch. He was cutting the underside of his own arm, where the skin was hairless and pale. It was a big knife. He was drawing it back and forth like the bow of a violin. His mouth opened to an O—he gasped abruptly, like a hiccup—and then he smiled. She kept going. But he was done. He leaned back and closed his eyes.

I didn’t know what it was about, but I knew it wasn’t about her. I could never trace the sources of his hurt or desire back to other people. They were closed circuits that began and ended with him.

One time he took me to the pier at night—not to the pier, quite, but underneath it. The salt-sodden planks were studded with barnacles that reminded me of Forklift, our spaniel, Tom’s spaniel, her skinny rib cage bumpy with pink nipples beneath the fur. She had so many! Even though we’d spayed her young.

In the dark down there, chattering men swathed like babies parked their shopping carts and jammed their wheels with sand. They used beeping canes to look for underground gold. Tom handed me a plastic bag full of nuts and bolts. “We’re going to plant them like seeds,” he said. “Everywhere we can.”

I did it because his invitations were scarce and precious, but for years I thought of those bundled ghosts, gripping their machines with rag-mittened fingers, pausing patiently to dig up our burials, disappointed every time.

We stayed in a peeling-paint motel off Highway 15. Guys in jogging suits bummed cigarettes from other guys in jogging suits; boys carried unplugged televisions in their arms, holding plastic bags of chips and candy between their teeth. Tired-looking women emerged from some doors and disappeared into other ones. I thought of Alice, who would have known how to tell stories about this place. She would have enchanted it.

In our dingy room, Tom pulled out his BlackBerry. The buttons glowed in the darkness, sending messages everywhere on earth. He typed with speed and purpose.

“What are you doing?” I asked. “Buying a company?”

He smiled. I’d found the right thing to say, and then I’d said it. This was a good feeling. Sometimes I was afraid it was the only good feeling I had left.