I suddenly remembered all that, going down the road after Sheena Baby, the way you will. I was afraid for some stranger to pick up Sheena Baby, because I didn’t know what he might do or try to do to her. These days, you don’t want to be hitching rides with strangers. There’s too much that can happen. I didn’t want to see anything worse than me befall her. I was bad enough, and I knew it, and I wanted to be better to her, try and rectify things if only I could. But she seemed to be walking faster, and I wasn’t getting any closer to her. My legs were hurting, and it was hot, but there was some beer in the car. She’d already passed it but I was getting closer to it. I finally reached it and stopped to take a breather beside it, and saw the cooler in the floorboard and said, Well, hell, as long as I’m here.

We’d conveniently had our two flats under a shade tree, and it wasn’t bad under those large reaching limbs. It was almost cool, and the beer was cold, so I helped myself to one and sat down on the side of the road, leaning up against the car. It gave me ample time for reflection. You can figure out just about anything if you get ample time for reflection. You can sit back then and get the big picture. I opened that beer and took a long cold drink of it, then lit a cigarette, and the world didn’t seem nearly as bad then. There were some other trees on the side of the road, and it was nice and shady, and there was a little ditch with some frogs sitting in it. It was kind of tranquil. I thought, Well, what if she does leave me? Is it the end of the world? No, it wasn’t the end of the world. The world wasn’t going to roll off its axis just because somebody had a broken heart. The sun wasn’t going to stop rising. I asked myself if it would be painful. Yes, it would be painful. It would hurt for an undetermined number of days or weeks. If I was lucky it wouldn’t hurt for the rest of my life, but there was no telling how long it would be until I found another one as good as her. They didn’t make them like her every day. I looked up the road. She was gone.