Livy Marston does not call as she promised she would. She shows up at our front door at nine a.m. wearing faded Levi’s and a white blouse tied at the waist, sapphire earrings one shade darker than her eyes, a silk scarf in her hair. On the street behind her, a midnight blue Fiat Spyder convertible idles like a resting cat.

“I’m kidnapping you,” she says. “If it’s all right with Annie.”

It takes a moment to center myself in the present. “Kidnaping me to where?”

She smiles. “It’s a surprise. If you thought about it, you’d know. But don’t think. Today is a right-brain day.”

Five minutes after I clear it with Mom and Annie, I’m clinging to the passenger door of the Spyder as Livy races up the highway, cutting in and out of traffic like a Grand Prix driver. She borrowed the car from a friend of her mother’s, and we both know why. Our senior year in high school, after she received some honor or other, Livy was given a Fiat convertible much like this one by her father. The night they brought it back from the dealership in New Orleans, she and I drove across half the state with the top down, drinking beer and reveling in the promise of futures unbound by visible limits. We spent many of our best moments in that car, and she has apparently decided to relive some of them. I’ve fantasized about scenes like this more than once, but there is something eerie about tearing up the sun-drenched highway toward the edge of town twenty years after we did it the first time, and in the same car.

As the Spyder crosses the westbound bridge into Louisiana, Maude Marston’s words echo in my mind: You ruined my daughter’s life, you bastard. I want to ask Livy outright what her mother was referring to, but Livy always had a way of being elliptical where serious matters were concerned.

“What did you mean, today is a right-brain day?” I ask.

She laughs. “I mean today everything is off limits.” Her voice has deepened slightly over the years. “Everything except experience.”

“Livy, I have some questions.”

“You mean like why are my husband and I separated? Why did you and I really split up in college? Why did my father try to destroy yours?”

“Yes. Little things like that.”

“We’ll get to all that. I have questions too. But first we give ourselves a little of the past. A little innocence.” She grants me a brilliant smile. “We owe ourselves that.”