“I write five letters home a week and my phone bill comes in a box,” he said. “Don’t you like them anymore?”

“I don’t want to talk about this.” Her knuckles turned white on the wheel.

“You better. You’re hurting their feelings.” He leaned with the car into the next curve and looked down a mountainside strewn with loose shale.

Colette picked up a hand and let it drop. “It hurts to talk to them, so I don’t do it. When they’ve got me on the phone, it’s like a big suction forms, drawing me back down there.”

“Does it hurt not to talk to them?”

“Yes, that, too.”

This was enough. He could have said something more, but he knew her limit. It was enough to know she hurt when she didn’t talk to them. If she wouldn’t hurt then, he would have nothing to do with her.

Colette drove even without Paul. Using the car proved that she needed it. Watching people as she drove past them, she checked to see if they saw her, then willed herself not to see them. The tension of trying not to see pedestrians got on her nerves.

When she drove the car to a shopping center, she parked it on the lot’s fringe, never next to another car, and when she would return on her long trek from the store, she would walk around it to check for dings. The day she found the first one, in a Sears parking lot, she felt violated and cried like a schoolgirl.

One Saturday, when her car was in for maintenance, she borrowed Paul’s Crown Victoria to run her errands. She was self-conscious, as though she had gone shopping in hair rollers. She noticed, however, that no one looked at her. The car was a rolling cliché, unnoticeable and matched by yeoman Fords everywhere. After one day of riding in the plodding sedan, which smelled slightly of oil, she became used to it, the aroma, the tintinnabulation of loose tools in the trunk.

She had to pay to have the Mercedes hand-washed and -waxed because she didn’t trust the two-dollar car washes anymore. She fretted about oil-change intervals, types of fuel. She had to protect her investment, her commitment to twenty years of driving the same vehicle. At the bank she never parked under a tree where birds might congregate, and daily she chipped her nails by scraping dried bugs off the grille. She maintained her pride in the vehicle, since it and glittering things like it were what she had come to California for.

One day Dirk stopped her in the hall next to the vault. “Hey, you look a little steamed, gal.” He put a palm on the wall by her head. She guessed he had seen this move in an old cowboy film.

“I have been fighting for two days with a lounge-lizard trust recipient who wants a ten-thousand-dollar advance to pay his bar tabs. He has insulted me in every way he can think of, including an offer to sleep with me as a bribe.”