Never waste time with anyone who doesn’t lift you up. I think of Samuel, of how years melt away. Of how being twenty-nine-coming-up-on-thirty feels so old when it really isn’t — but it isn’t young either. Time is sneaky that way, how it moves along and you don’t realize.

I remember the hot July three years ago. I flew into Kentucky from Vietnam. I’d been teaching Buddhist nuns English but I had been accepted into the Ph.D. program in Vancouver so I’d finished my contract early. The hard part was leaving Viola, my roommate, behind. She had no idea what to do with her life, so she was teaching ESL until something better came along. She just didn’t want to go back to Campobello Island where her father was slowly dying. The person she was at home repulsed her. She wanted to see the world.

But I had seen enough of the world and was happy when the plane brought me back over the ocean to the U.S.A. for rest and relaxation with my friend Gail from high school. Her husband was in Moscow for the summer, learning Russian. We thought it would be a good time for a long visit. We planned to drive home together — she would visit with her family in Nova Scotia and then I would head off in my pickup truck to university in British Columbia to start my Ph.D. in cultural anthropology.

Saigon–San Francisco–Chicago–Lexington, and there was Gail, all tanned and summery. In the car she told me Tara was flying in next week. Tara was going to drive back with us. I was quiet, she was quiet, and then Gail said she was sorry — Tara had announced she was coming and had already bought a ticket. When Tara had found out I was flying in from Vietnam, she had taken a month off from her summer job in a shoe store in Toronto so she could join us. She was going to the University of Toronto and doing a commerce degree so she could be just like her dad. And she wanted to join us so it would be just like the good old days. But there were no good old days, I told Gail. She shrugged.

All the way through Kentucky–Ohio–West Virginia–Pennsylvania–New Jersey–New York–Connecticut–Massachusetts–New Hampshire–Maine–the ferry crossing of the Atlantic to Nova Scotia–the drive down Highway 101 to the town of Nolen, I remember writing in my journal:

I hate the person in the back seat.

I hate the person in the back seat.

Die Die Die.

Die Die Die.

Tara said she wished she could have my inspiration and write so much.

Gail was the only one insured to drive the car, so Tara and I were always the passengers. Whenever I wanted to sit in the back, Tara would jump in the back first. Whenever I wanted to sit in the front, she would. If we stopped for a pee break and I wanted to take a walk, she would follow me. When I read a book, Tara asked which one. She wanted to listen to commercial radio and we wanted to listen to mixed tapes. She talked incessantly about the good old days, how quickly high school went, how much she missed home and all the fun we had when we were sweet sixteen, how we were always best friends. She had seen Samuel in Toronto. He was studying biology. She never thought he’d go to university, she said. It was weird seeing him there. It made her homesick. He’d seen her and waved. She said she felt embarrassed. She never really knew him, she said. I was the one who knew everybody.