right next to mine, and I used to get woken up by the sound of noisy lovemaking, though I was pretty sure Ulrik was alone. I didn’t tell Grace that part.
“It was the car that I used to drive to the bookstore,” I said. “Ulrik bought that BMW wagon from a guy who was selling roses by the side of the road in St. Paul, so I got the Escort. Two months after I’d gotten my license, I got a flat tire in it.” I’d been sixteen in the most naive sense of the word: simultaneously euphoric and terrified to be driving home from work by myself for the first time, and when the tire made an incredible noise that sounded like a gun going off by my head, I thought I might die.
“Did you know how to change tires?” Grace asked. She asked the question like she did.
“Not a chance. I had to pull it over in the slush by the side of the road and use the cell phone I’d just been given for my birthday to call Beck for help. First time I was using the phone, and it was to say I couldn’t change a flat tire. Totally unmanning.”
Grace laughed again, softly. “Unmanning,” she repeated.
“Unmanning,” I assured her, glad to hear that little laugh. I thought back to the memory. Beck had been a long time getting there, dropped off by Ulrik on his way to work. Ignoring my bleak expression, Ulrik waved cheerily at me from the window of the BMW: “Later, boy-o!” His wagon vanished into the oncoming gloom, the taillights neon red in the snow gray world.
“So Beck arrived,” I said, aware then that I had included an anecdote with Beck after all, though I hadn’t meant to. Maybe all of my anecdotes had Beck in them. “He said, ‘So you’ve killed the car, then?’
“He had been all bundled in coats and gloves and scarves, but despite them, he’d already been shivering. He’d whistled when he saw the comically deflated tire. ‘That’s a beauty. You run over a moose?’”
“Had you?” Grace asked.
“No,” I said. “Beck made fun of me and showed me where the spare tire was and —”
I dropped off. I’d meant to tell the story of when Ulrik had finally sold the Escort, how he’d cooked four pounds of bacon and put it in the trunk when people came to look at it because he’d read that real estate agents baked cookies to sell houses to women. Instead I’d somehow gotten sidetracked in my drowsiness and the story I’d started now ended with Beck’s smile vanishing in the time it took for headlights to come over the hill and disappear on the other side — with a pile of scarves and sweaters and gloves on the ground behind the Escort and me with a useless tire iron in my hand and the memory of Beck saying half my name as he shifted.
“And what?”
I tried to think if there was a way that I could spin the story, to make it more cheerful, but as I did, I remembered an aspect of it that I hadn’t thought about for years. “Beck shifted. I was still there with the damn tire iron and still was just as dumb as before.”
It had just been me, picking up his coat and countless shirts from the ground, knocking the bulk of the gritty snow from them, throwing the lot of them in the back of the Escort. Allowing myself one good door slam. Then linking my arms behind my head and turning away from the road and the car. Because the loss of Beck had not yet begun to sting. The fact that I was stranded by the road, on the other hand, had sunk in immediately.
Grace made a quiet, sad noise, sorry for that Sam long ago, though it took that Sam a long time to realize what he’d really lost in those few minutes.
“I was there for a while, staring at all the useless junk in the back — like, Ulrik had a hockey mask in the trunk, and it kept on looking at me like You’re an idiot, Sam Roth. And then I heard this car pull up behind me — I totally forgot about this part until just now, Grace — and who do you think stopped to see if I needed help?”
Grace rubbed her nose on my shirt. “I don’t know. Who?”
“Tom Culpeper,” I said.
“No!” Grace pulled back so that she