“Grimshaw!” I hurry after her. “Don’t you try it, okay? Let me.”

Once we get going, Grimshaw takes the passenger seat, gets nail polish remover and cotton balls out of her suitcase, and starts doing her nails. Boomtown has cheered her up. Maybe I’ll never have to tell her about Mike. Maybe she’ll just forget him. I sit on the hump in the middle. As advertised, Bo’s a talker. When he first got out of the Marine Corps, oh, about a year and a half ago now, he worked for a big company and had a regular route, and he couldn’t stand that, going the same place over and over again. He’s an independent owner-operator now and can go where he wants, more or less. He’s hauling rolls of synthetic rubber to a gasket factory in Iowa. He talks about gaskets for a long time, that same kind of flood-burst of words I first heard on Bob’s radio, as he stares straight ahead of him at the white dotted line in his headlights. Gaskets are everywhere, it turns out, places you’d never expect—engines, tanks of all kinds—and made out of just about every kind of material you can imagine. Without gaskets, life would be a leaky, god-awful mess.

Maybe the feed salesman wouldn’t have been so bad, I think. I’m not sure this guy notices that anyone else is in the truck with him. I steal a glance at Grimshaw, to see what she thinks of our gasket lesson. Her feet are braced against the dashboard, and by the light of the open glove box she is painting her fingernails blue. When she’s done, she cracks the window and holds her hand up in the breeze. We watch a billboard go by, advertising slot machines.

“I’ve never gambled,” she announces. “I have a feeling I’d be good at it.”

“There’s nothing to it.” Bo says. “You put your money on the table, and they take it off. It’s a very simple process.”

Up ahead, a gas station sign floats in the darkness. Bo gears down, and the truck shudders to a stop. Inside are two one-armed bandits and a blackjack table. Except for a blond girl in a tank top playing solitaire on the counter, the place is deserted. We stand next to the blackjack table and wait for her to notice us, which she appears to have decided not to do. She’s chewing the biggest wad of green bubble gum I’ve ever seen. I notice a sign that says we have to be twenty-one to gamble.

“Hey!” Bo snaps his fingers at her. She looks up at him with flat blue eyes and blows a bubble half as big as her head. She snaps it back into her mouth and pushes herself away from her cards. She slaps across the floor in shower slippers.

“Three dollar chips,” says Bo.