“They got physio here on staff,” said Trevor. “Just started with an acupuncturist a couple times a month, so I hear. If you believe in that bullshit.”

“That’s nice,” I said.

“Let’s go, Kelli-bean!” Trevor hollered, banging the flat of his hand against the hood.

“Not going. Kelli not going.” Kelli began to rock back and forth. I felt a little like rocking back and forth myself.

“She’s toast,” I said. “I’ll come back. I’ll set up an appointment on Monday.”

“She’ll be ok in the truck, eh?” said Trevor.

“In the truck,” said Kelli, rocking.

I glanced at her. Kelli had been left alone in the car before — her stubbornness had frequently won the day when my mother brought her along on errands. My mother would simply turn on the radio, open the window a crack, and auto-lock the doors. Kelli was not the type to wander away. Kelli, an adult woman fully possessed of her faculties as far as any passersby could tell, would sit murmuring to herself and people-watching until my mother’s return. But Trevor didn’t know any of that. So on the one hand, I could claim, even mustering a faint air of outrage, that Kelli by no means could be left alone in the truck. And maybe even fabricate a story about how one time she had been left alone in a car with near-disastrous results.

On the other hand, we could leave Kelli in the truck. We could lock the doors and I could dart inside with Trevor for a couple of minutes. And then we could go home.

I looked at Trevor. He wasn’t looking back at me, he was watching a teenager in a Nissan Sentra completely fail to parallel park nearby. He tapped two fingers on the hood of his truck in a steady tick-tock-tick-tock percussion. He wasn’t waiting for me to decide, I realized. He was waiting for me to get a move on. And he felt he was being polite about it. Patient.

4

The barbecue hadn’t been used in decades, as far as I knew. I recalled my mother covering it up decisively after my eighteenth birthday party, during which my boyfriend at the time had received a drunken faceful of propane flames that nearly sizzled away his eyebrows and his over-gelled eighties bangs. But Trevor was determined to fire the thing up.

It was about five thirty when we finally made it home and he insisted, to apologize for keeping us out all day, on cooking us steaks — “My treat!” As Kelli and I climbed out of the truck, me making mild and inarticulate noises of dissent, Trevor instructed us to “get the fixins ready” while he popped over to Superstore. Fifteen minutes later, he was back, a bag of steaks in one hand and a twelve-pack of beer in the other.

By “fixins” I’d assumed he meant some kind of side dish, so I told him I had made a salad. Trevor shook his head. He never ate anything raw, he explained, so a salad would not do. Of everything I’d experienced that day, the revelation that Trevor had not consumed a piece of raw food in his entire lifetime threw me off the most. I stood there, rhyming off names of fruits and vegetables in disbelief.