Yet there was more, both knew it, and as his senior year ran out they groped to find it without committing sins so dark and final their lives would be forever deformed. Elsie was less afraid of this than he; he refused to test how far she would let him “go.” It had become their way in the car for him to bend over and kiss the silky warm inner sides of her thighs and then press his mouth as far up as he could into the warmth, her warmth, its aroma at times like the tang his mother gave off on a summer day and at others of the musky mash bins in the back of her father’s store. At first she resisted, pushing at his shoulders, and then came to expect it. In those days even teen-age girls wore girdles: the crotch of her underpants was guarded by edges of stiff elastic, and though she shyly edged her hips forward in the car seat his lips could not quite reach the damp cotton. Not that he knew enough to make her come with his mouth, or how girls came at all. The pleasure was his, in being this close to a secret, in having her yield it up to him, even her fragrance, which was strong enough at times to exert a counterforce, a wish to pull his face away. But he loved it there between her legs, and how hot and sticky his cheeks grew against her thighs, and the graceless awkwardness this maneuver asked of her, still wearing her knee socks and loafers.

The summer before he went off to MIT, their experiments took on a desperate edge. She knew he was slipping away; the baton had not been passed after all. Owen had got a summer job on a surveying crew, tending the target marks and chopping brush out of the sight lines. Elsie had been sent to a Lutheran camp in Ohio, where she was a counsellor, for six weeks. He would get rides with the crew to far corners of the county and have to be fetched from Alton when he could not hitch a ride south; he would come home exhausted and dirty, and tried not to think that college in a foreign region was swooping down upon him and would carry him away—for good, he both hoped and feared. His grandparents were ailing and his parents were no longer the young couple on Mifflin Avenue into whose bed he would climb when a dream scared him.