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“Dat’s what they say of this cauntry back home, Kath: ‘America, the Land of Milk and Honey.’ Bot they never tell you the milk’s gone sour and the honey’s stolen.”

AT THE FIRST sign of daylight spreading over the cars in the El Rancho parking lot, I gave up trying to sleep and drove the Bonneville down the coast on Highway 1. The sun was still coming up from the east. The ocean to my right was maroon, the sky above it silver. There were sand trails through the thick purple ice plant that grew along the roadside. The few cars I passed had their headlights on, and I kept hearing Deputy Burdon’s voice in my head warning me to stay away from Bisgrove Street until I’d talked to a lawyer and straightened things out or else I’d be trespassing and up for arrest. This got my heart beating fast, and I kept the radio off and drove for twenty minutes, past the state beaches through the tourist-shop town of Montara to Moss Beach, where I stopped at a gas station/beach supply store and drank coffee at a table by the window. The morning was still quiet. The beach across the road was empty, and I watched a seagull dive into the water for a fish. At the front of the store was an old woman behind the register. I went to the cigarette machine, stuck in my coins, and pulled the knob hard: Who did they think they were evicting? And for what? A tax they billed to the wrong fucking house? My dead father’shouse?

I backed out the Bonneville and drove south along the water. I lit another cigarette and I kept seeing Nick’s face the morning he left, the way he looked in the shadowed room after he woke me with a nudge, sitting on the side of the bed. At first I thought I’d slept late and he was on his way out the door to work, but then I saw how early it was, and I could smell all the cigarettes on his breath, and I knew he’d been up a long time. I moved to switch on the bedside lamp but he touched my hand to stop me. Then he held it. In that dim light, I couldn’t make out his eyes.

“What, honey? What?” I said. I was thinking of his father or his mother, a late-night phone call I’d missed. But as soon as he opened his mouth and said, “Kath,” I knew it was about us again, and I started to sit up, but he put his other hand on my chest and I stayed still and waited for him to say what he was going to say. But he never said another word; he sat there and stared in the direction of my face, and even when I asked him what, what’s the matter, Nicky, my heart jerking all confused under his hand, he only stared, and then, after another half minute of nothing, he squeezed my fingers and left the room, and I jumped out of bed in just a T-shirt and followed him through the house to the front door, saying, “Wait, wait.” I stopped and watched him get into the used Honda we’d just bought as a second car. Daylight was breaking out over the yard and the woods across the road. Then I saw the two suitcases and his bass guitar in the backseat, and I ran out into the driveway, the January air hitting me like a bat. He was already backing up and I rapped on the driver’s window and screamed his name and kept doing it until he shifted gears in the street and drove down the hill, not once looking back at me, even in the rearview mirror.