Some of those evenings when Elsie did the driving, pulling up in an impressive machine, she would be invited in, into the little house’s front parlor, where the bulky Rausch furniture from the Willow house had suddenly gone shabby and was covered with hairs from the two collies his mother had acquired as part of her vision of rural life. Smartly dressed in this setting of declining gentility, at whose edges Owen’s two grandparents made a shuffling, murmuring retreat, Elsie spoke to Owen’s mother with a lively courtesy. Her honey-brown eyes flashed; her scarlet lips smiled. Uneasily standing by, in a flannel shirt whose sleeves were too short, in scuffed laced shoes that looked oafish compared with Elsie’s polished penny loafers (much on view as she smartly crossed and recrossed her legs), Owen felt like a baton being passed. He felt he was present, as one pleasantry followed another, at a duel. His mother too had once been the smartly turned-out daughter of a successful rural entrepreneur; she knew a certain code, she knew “how to behave.” She also knew how people did behave, and couldn’t do much about it.

When the young people, these social observances discharged, achieved freedom in a car of Elsie’s, it seemed perverse, after the movie or the miniature golf was behind them and they had found a parking spot, to have her seated on his left instead of on his right. Come at this way, she felt like a strange girl, with whom he must begin from scratch. Their chins and mouths made angles opposite from the usual, and his hands coped with reversed routes.

“Should we switch?” she asked, when he remarked on this strangeness. Her voice came out breathier, lower in her throat, than the polite, Dutch-flavored voice she used with his mother and the teachers at school. Her lipstick had already begun to smear and flake. Her face was waxily lit by a streetlamp half a block away; they sometimes parked in a hidden place he knew from his childhood walks, at the back of the Dairy Queen lot on Cedar Top. He lived ten miles away, and she four miles more to the south, but Willow was the town whose map he knew and where he felt safest. Other times, they would park up by Shale Hill, near what had been the Victory Gardens, on a dirt road made by recent developers. Always, as the scope of her permissions widened, he searched for even safer spots, where the police would never come up and shine flashlights in their faces, as once had happened, behind the long low sheds of the old farmers’ market. As she sat high behind the wheel of her father’s expensive car, her mussed hair caught fire in stray loops and strands from the distant streetlamp.

“Let’s,” he agreed. “If you don’t mind my sitting behind your father’s wheel.”