“I like to get input from the ladies when I shop.” He grabbed a navy T-shirt and studied the illustration, a cartoon drawing of a woman with enormous breasts and a rocket launcher between her legs.

“That would be a definite no,” she said.

“I like it.” He tossed it over his shoulder and began thumbing through a stack of jeans.

“I thought you wanted my input.”

He stared at her blankly. “Why’d you think that?”

She gave up.

A few minutes later as she set her meager purchases by the register, she experienced a stab of yearning for her pearls and headbands, her slim summer dresses and neat little sandals. They were the objects that anchored her. In her ballet flats and cashmere sweaters, a cell phone tucked to her ear, she knew who she was, not only the adopted daughter of the former president of the United States but a crackerjack lobbyist and first-rate fund-raiser for important causes that help children. Her stomach started to hurt again.

Panda shot her a sullen look as he paid for their purchases. Once they were outside, he shoved everything into the cheap gray nylon duffel he’d bought, wadding up her neon panties with his charcoal gray boxer briefs, and secured the duffel to the Yamaha with a bungee.

Panda didn’t like interstate highways, she’d discovered, and they rode east on dusty secondary roads that ran through dying towns and past run-down ranches. She didn’t know where they were going. Didn’t care. As evening began to fall, he stopped at a twelve-unit motel next to an abandoned driving range. The first thing she spotted when he came out of the motel’s tiny office was the single key dangling from his big hand. “I’d like my own room,” she said.

“Then you pay for it.” He tossed his leg over the bike and, without waiting for her, rode toward the last motel unit. She walked, her legs wobbly. At least straddling that big leather vibrating seat had made her feel nominally alive—right up to the moment she remembered those broad shoulders she was forced to stare at all day belonged to a man who communicated with grunts, ate with his mouth open, and was only putting up with her for the money. A man she was about to share a seedy motel room with.

All she had to do was make a phone call. One phone call and this insanity would be over.

She kept walking.

He was unfastening the bungee cord from the back of the bike when she reached their motel unit. He freed the duffel that held their recent purchases, then flipped open one of the saddlebags. As he pulled out that night’s six-pack, she spotted another bumper sticker, this one plastered to the inside of the flap.

The message was so over-the-top vile, it took her a moment to absorb what it said.