“Yes, sure, but maybe the point is you can’t grow up to get out for good if the family isn’t supportive in the beginning. A strong base is like a launching pad. But a weak one is just a swamp. I think that’s why my mother never got wholly away—there was no push upward from behind her. She was meant to fizzle out.”

“Oh, come on, Tina, she wasn’t a fizzle; she was a charming and lovely lady. Maybe she really liked and needed the turmoil of her life. Would she have been happier if she hadn’t tried a getaway?”

Tina walked silently for a bit, thinking of this. “Maybe you’re right, Jason. She gave me so much nourishment, she must have had strengths I didn’t see.”

She was silent again, sucking on the peach pit, her brow furrowed with concentration. “But you know what, Jason, we didn’t mean a thing.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean to the government, to the rotten system, to the Pentagon, to the generals, to old shit Nixon, to any of them.”

“How about ourselves?”

“Well, that’s different,” Tina said emphatically. “I’ll always be glad for what we did. If this war ever ends, we had our hand in its ending and we were the voice of reason, not the wild loonies they tried to make us seem. You and I and Missy and Tim and Duke can always be proud of that, Jason.”

“How about Duke? Are you still with him?”

Tina thought of Duke’s seed in her belly, and again felt like Peter denying. “No,” she said. “We were never going to make it in the long run, in the big way. I want to do something with myself—I’m not going to just flop around a commune and make granola and boil organic cabbage all my life! I’m really into what I’ve been doing this year—medieval Latin and the Comedy.”

“Maybe Duke knows better than we do what an education is. He’s still hanging on to what we were all about just a couple of years ago.”