Colette’s anger whizzed off like a rocket. She yelled about security at the mall, she yelled at him for not knowing where to buy a starter, she yelled until all her straight white teeth showed. And when Paul told her he guessed a new starter would be about eight hundred dollars, she started over. Finally, he looked around the parking lot and interrupted her. “Colette, it’s just a car, babe.”

“Just a car! Do you know what the note on this ‘just a car’ is?”

“Why you yelling at me? I’m not the one pouring money down a snake hole for this egomobile. Somebody like you ought to stick with a Toyota.” He regretted the words as soon as they came out.

“What you mean, somebody like me? You think I’m not supposed to own a car like this because I’m a young bayou girl from a trashy town in Louisiana?”

He braced himself, set his jaw. “You said it, I didn’t.”

Colette exploded into a crying fit, resting her fists on his chest and bawling into them. Paul’s mouth fell open and his arms wobbled at his sides. Then he tried to touch her, and she cried, “Keep your hands away” as she burrowed against his chest. He had never seen Colette cry like this in his life, and she hid her face from him. “Don’t look at me,” she squealed. “Turn your head. Don’t look at me. I don’t do this.”

“I got to admit,” he said at last, “it’s like watching a bird jump rope.”

*   *   *

The next day, when Paul came home from church, he saw Colette’s Mercedes in his parking lot, obvious among the little Chevys and Isuzus. She got out of it and came to sit with him in the Ford, moving his copy of Appleton’s Cyclopedia of Steam Mechanics for 1898 to the backseat. “Let’s take a drive up to Mount Shasta and look at the forest,” she told him.

He lounged back in the creaking seat and watched her suspiciously. She was cheerful. “If I look at another big pine tree, I’ll turn into Bambi,” he told her.

“You can’t be serious. You’d rather sit in town with your nose in that book than ride with me to the mountains?”

“I guess so. You won’t let me read it on the way, I know that.”

“Come on. I don’t want to drive up there by myself. You can’t tell me you’re used to these big California forests already.”

He focused his large brown eyes carefully on her. “No. I could camp out in them twice a year and be happy. I like nature as well as the next fellow, but I’m not Smokey the Bear, babe. I get my fill.”

“How could you ever get your fill of one of these mountains?” Her voice accused him, suddenly on the verge of anger.