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some kid I liked for a while. He was a baker.”
    “A baker? Really?”
    “Really.”
    “What did he bake?”
    “Muffins. Bread. Cakes. Pies.”
    “So what happened?”
    She rolled over onto her back. “I was a part-time cashier at the bakery. I saw the ad in Creative Loafing and I called.”
    “Where is this baker now?”
    “Married his high school sweetheart. That was his plan all along.
Let’s not talk anymore, OK?”
    “You never told him?”
    “No. It didn’t involve him.”
    “It didn’t? How can you say that?”
    “I’d flunked out of school. I just did this thing. It was my business.”
    “If it was me,” he said, after a while, “I think I’d want to know.”
    There was a rustling from the next bed, and Emily got up and padded into the bathroom. The toilet flushed. When she came out, she did not return to her bed, but went to theirs and got in next to Bernice, who backed up to make room for her. Landis pressed up against Bernice’s back and put his arm over her, his fingers just brushing against Emily’s hot shoulder. As he lay there trying to gauge from their breathing whether either of them was asleep, the girl took his hand and squeezed it, lightly at first, then harder. She was making sounds. He thought about what he had prayed for as a child—a dog, a ham radio, his parents to stop the yelling that went on night after night. That was the thing about kids—they believed if they just asked the right way, they could get the things they wanted, all of them.

    In the morning, Emily’s shirt was soaked and clammy with sweat, but her fever was down. “It was the bath,” said Bernice, proudly.
    Landis left them to clean up, walked back to the repair place, and struck a deal with the owner: the much newer Hyundai, plus a hundred cash, for the Nova. It was fifteen years old and on its second engine, and there was rust lacing the metal around the wheel wells, but it ran, the tires were decent, and the radio worked.
    “Never thought I’d have a Korean car,” the owner mused. He was a fat, red-faced man of about fifty, with thick eyebrows. From the adjacent service bay came hammering sounds as the boy who’d towed
them yesterday attempted to remove a tire from a rim. “But I used to say that about the Japs, and look at them now. That Nova’s a Jap car. I had a real Nova, a ’69, with a 350 V-8. That sumbitch could fly. Traded it for an El Camino. Shouldn’t have. Did you know the bombs Japan dropped on us at Pearl Harbor were made out of steel we sold them?”
    “I guess what goes around comes around,” said Landis, fingering a collection box for cerebral palsy on the counter. “I’ll be back in a few minutes with my wife to sign over the title.”
    “I’ll bet that car is made of steel from bombs we dropped on Korea. I wouldn’t be surprised.”
    “Swords into plowshares,” said Landis. “Or sedans.” He thought about Emily. How long would it be before she asked to go home? It surprised him that she hadn’t already, but there was something between her and Bernice, an understanding, that he would probably always be excluded from. He supposed he didn’t mind that much.
    “My point exactly. If you ask me, what with these terrorists, the world’s finally come into focus. Good guys and bad guys—that’s all there really is. It’s nice to have an intelligent conversation like this from time to time.” The owner wiped sweat off his face with the back of his hand. It occurred to Landis that the last thing he ought to be doing was making an impression on people. He found a penny in his pocket and stuck it in the box.
    “Well, I’ll go get the plates off that one,” the man said.
    Landis followed him out into the sun. A mangy yellow dog watched him from the shade beside a Dumpster. As he headed back up the street to the motel, he reminded himself not to forget to transfer the booster seat they’d bought last week, the two of them shopping the baby section of Walmart like any