“You did mean to bring it up.” She sits straight up in her seat, works the rubber band into a loop, again putting both elbows up, and makes a ponytail. He reaches around and touches the hair at the back of her neck—remembering, or perhaps not remembering, that first view of her, at the hotel, last summer—and he feels a tightness in his legs.

“No, I didn’t,” he says. “No, wait, I’m not telling the truth. I did want to bring it up.” He moves his hand away, putting both on the sides of the steering wheel. “I wanted to bring it up. Yes, I’m a little tired of your old man. I mean isn’t it a crime being such a hard-ass…I mean, for God’s sake you’re legal now. You’re not his.”

He turns the key and feels soothed by the roar of the engine. He spent the whole day yesterday underneath the car, in his garage, with only a space heater going to keep warm. Grit from swabbing out the oil pan was still beneath his fingernails. He’d adjusted the timing with one of those old-fashioned spark gauges; he’d gone over the plugs with a clean rag.

The love he felt that first night, after speaking of it to his friend Mac, had gone on for months; they went out on very tentative dates—to the one movie theater in Petoskey, the Gaslight, where Jaws II was showing about a year after its release. The love had stayed flat and firm and shimmering even after those first visits to her father up in the Upper Peninsula. Propped on large, gray cinder blocks, her father’s house wasn’t much more than an elongated shack with a tin roof and a muddy, dog-mauled front yard scattered with the usual assortment of junk: old car axles, a differential assembly, something that was once probably a sheet of corrugated iron but now resembled a lace antimacassar of rust. Along the side was a woodpile and a chopping stump with an axe lodged deep in its side.

“You don’t love me.” She speaks with a flat nasal affect; it’s an unattractive voice, really, even to those who are used to it.

“I do love you.” He eases the car back, does a reverse K turn. Sand has blown along the edge of the parking lot. Signposts shake in the wind. He snaps the heater on.

“My father is a good man,” she says. “He worked his ass off to support us, and you know that has to mean something.”

“He hates my guts.”

“He just doesn’t want me down here overnight. He wants to know where I am. And, well, the truth is he needs me…”

“So call him.” He drives out into the main road. In the summer it is all fruit trees, farmhouses, wind-brushed fields of golden weeds, and past those the brilliant blue of Lake Michigan. Before his big brother Danny died in Vietnam they used to come here to swim. He really was too young to remember, but he had a snapshot of it, one of those old ones with the white border, and on the back, neatly stamped, beside the word Kodak, the date in red ink. In that photo his brother stood in the sand, his face midsummer brown, in a tight white T-shirt. In the crook of one arm he held his little brother like a football.