'Perhaps I should mention that at the toll booth for the Houlton exit her photo's receptacle came free when I pulled down the visor to get at the ticket, and curved airborne over to me in the backwash from the window I had to roll down, and ended half-wedged between the brake and the floor. In reaching for it I dropped my money and somehow touched the accelerator with my foot. The car moved forward and nudged the controlled gate that lowers to stop a vehicle until its debt to the state is discharged. The woman in the toll booth was out like a shot; a policeman in his cruiser by the road looked over and put down something he was eating. I had to scoop up my money and fork it over at the gate. The receptacle was bent and dusted with floor-dirt and cracker crumbs. The toll-taker was polite but firm. There was honking.'
The trip Bruce and his parents and his sister invited me for to Maine year before last was the last time I think everything was totally good between us. On the trip he pointed at things out of the airplane window and made his Mom and I laugh. We kept our legs touching and he'd touch my hand too, very gently, so his Mom wouldn't see him. At his aunt and uncle's house we went to a lake, and swam, and could of gone waterskiing if we wanted. Sometimes we took long walks all day down back roads and got dusty and sometimes lost, but we always got back because Bruce could tell times and directions by the sun. We drank water with our hands out of little streams that were really cold. Once Bruce was picking us blueberries for lunch and got stung by a bee on the hand and I pulled the stinger out, because I had nails, and put a berry on the sting and he laughed and said he didn't care about anything, really. I had a wonderful time. It was really fun. It was when Bruce and I felt right. It felt right to be with him. It was maybe the last time it felt to me like there was both a real me and a real him when we were together. It was at his uncle's house, on some sweatshirts and clothes on the ground in some woods at night by a potato field, that I gave Bruce something I can't ever get back. I was glad I did it. But I think maybe that's when Bruce's feelings began to change. Maybe I'm wrong, but I think it kind of drove him away a little that I did it finally. That I finally wanted to, and he could see that I did. It's like he knew he really had me, and it made him go down inside himself, to have, instead of just want. I think he really likes to want. That's OK. I think maybe we were just meant to be friends the whole time. We knew each other ever since high school. We swam in the quarry where they made that movie. We had driver's education together, and took our tests for our driver's licenses in the same car, is how we got to really know each other. Except we didn't get really close until a long time after that, when we were both already in different colleges and only saw each other at vacations.'
'I hit Prosopopeia just as the sun goes seriously down and all sorts of crepuscular Maine life begins rustling darkly in a spiny old section of forest I am happy to leave behind at the corporation limit. I detour briefly to stop at an IGA and buy some cold Michelob as a bit of a housewarming present, something my mother had suggested and financed. Michelob is a beer my uncle loves and does not really drink so much as inhale. It's practically the only thing he can inhale. He has emphysema now, advanced, at fifty-five.
Even the few steps from a chair to the kitchen door and a hearty handshake and the appropriation of one of my light bags is enough to make him have to begin his puffing exercise. He sits heavily back in his chair and begins to breathe, rhythmically, with concentration, between pursed lips, as my aunt hugs me and makes happy sounds punctuated by "Lord" and "Well" and then whisks all my luggage upstairs in one load. There's not much luggage. I keep my bent receptacle with me. My uncle goes for a wheezer of adrenaline spray and resumes puffing as hard as he can, smiling tightly and waving away both my concern and his discomfort. He blows as though trying to extinguish a flame — which is perhaps close to what it felt like for him. He has dropped more weight, especially in his legs; his legs through his pants have a sticklike quality as he sits, breathing. Even thin and crinkled, though, he is still an eerie, breast-less copy of my mother, with: gray-white hair, an oval high-cheek-boned face, and blue pecans for eyes. Like my mother's, these eyes can be sharply lit as a bird's or sad and milky as a whale's; while my uncle puffs they are blank, unfocused, away. My aunt is an unreasonably pretty sixty, genuinely but not cloyingly nice, a lady against whom the only indictment might be hair dyed to a sort of sweet amber found nowhere in nature. She has put my portable life in my bedroom and asks whether I'd eat some supper. I'd eat anything at all. A television is on, with no sound, by an ancient electric stove of chipped white enamel and a new brown dishwasher. My uncle says I look like I was the one carried the car out here rather than the other way around. I know I do not look good. I've driven straight for almost thirty hours, a trip punctuated only by the filling and emptying of various tanks. My shirt is crunchy with old sweat, I have a really persistent piece of darkened apple skin between my two front teeth, and something has happened to a blood vessel in one of my eyes from staring so long at distance and cement — there is a small nova of red at the corner and a sandy pain when I blink. My hair needs a shampoo so badly it's almost yellow. I say I'm tired and sit down. My aunt gets bread from an actual bread box and takes a dish of tuna salad out of the refrigerator and begins stirring it up with a wooden spoon. My uncle eyes the beer on the kitchen counter, two tall silver six-packs already spreading a bright puddle of condensation on the linoleum. He looks over at my aunt, who sighs to herself and gives a tiny nod. My uncle is instantly up, no invalid; he gets two beers loose and puts one in front of me and pops the other and drains probably half of it in one series of what I have to say are unattractively foamy swallows. My aunt asks whether I'd like one sandwich or two. My uncle says I'd better just eat up that tuna salad, that they've had it twice now and if it hangs around much longer they're going to have to name it. His eyes are completely back, they are in him, and he uses them to laugh, to tease, to express. Just like his sister. He looks at the Sears receptacle by my place at the table and asks what I've got there. My aunt looks at him. I say memorabilia. He says it looks like it had a hard trip. The kitchen smells wonderfuclass="underline" of old wood and new bread and something sharply sweet, a faint tang of tuna. I can hear my mother's car ticking and cooling out in the driveway. My aunt puts two fat sandwiches down in front of me, pops my tall beer, gives me another warm little hug with a joy she can't contain and I can't understand, given that I have more or less just appeared here, with no explicable reason and little warning other than a late-night phone call two days ago and some sort of follow-up conversation with my parents after I'd hit the road. She says it's a wonderful surprise having me come visit them and she hopes I'll stay just as long as I'd like and tell her what I like to eat so she can stock up and didn't I feel so good and proud graduating out of such a good school in such a hard subject that she could never in a dog's age understand. She sits down. We begin to talk about the family. The sandwiches are good, the beer slightly warm. My uncle eyes the six-packs again and goes into his shirt pocket for the disk of snuff he dips since he had to stop smoking. There is cool, sweet, grassy air through the kitchen screens. I am too tired not to feel good.'
'I felt so sorry when he said he was going to have to go out of town, maybe for the whole summer. But I got mad when he said now we were even, summer for summer. Because him leaving this summer is his choice, just like last summer was all his choices, too.