“Want an animal cracker?” Renee asked, as they pulled away from a Shell along route 80. While Jack had pumped gas and cleaned the windshield, she’d gone in to buy bottled waters. They’d just crossed the Platt River, and had another day’s drive before them.

“I didn’t know they still made these,” Renee said. “I used to love them with cocoa when I was a kid. I think there’s a song about that, but I don’t remember it. Have you ever had that eerie feeling when you’re not sure if you remember something or only imagined it? Here’s a sheep. Baaaaaa.”

“I don’t want a sheep.”

“Yesterday, when we saw herds of them, you said they were beautiful.”

“Know why Scotsmen wear kilts?”

“No, Jack, but I was just wondering.”

“Sheep can hear a zipper at a hundred yards.”

“All right, how’s about a monkey with a banana?”

“Very unappetizing,” Jack said as he opened his window to the smell of diesel fumes, fertilizer, and green corn—in that order.

“Say wha? Jack, I can’t hear when wind is roaring in.”

“Too bad, I just hummed the song you couldn’t remember,” Jack said. “It’s called ‘Animal Crackers and Cocoa to Drink.’ ”

“Cocoa what?” Renee clutched her head like The Thinker, holding her hair down as if it might blow off. Her hair, she’d complained, was at an in-between length. She was growing out the spiky boyish style she’d sported since her divorce. That cut was a feminist statement, she said, not to mention a conversation starter in bars. She’d dyed her hair a streaky sun-on-straw to match the moussed way it poked up. But now she felt beyond the age of someone with a cut like that. She was allowing her natural color back, too, a shade she called “almost blonde.” Before giving up her sun-streaked spiky look, she’d had a professional photographer take a set of photos. She’d worn an off-the-shoulder dress so that once the photos were cropped it appeared as if she’d posed nude. She’d given Jack a blow-up mounted in an art deco silver frame. When he opened the gift wrapping, he stared at the photo as if lost in thought, then looked at Renee and said, There never was a question for me, was there?

Does that mean you like it? she’d asked.

Jack raised his window and turned on the air. “I said eating a monkey sounds disgusting.” His voice sounded overly loud without the road racket to shout over.

“A simple ‘No thanks’ would have sufficed.”

“No simians, thank you,” Jack said.

“Are you still in a bad mood?”

“Still? I was never in a bad mood. Why would I be in a bad mood?”

“About the stories we, you know, exchanged. It’s not fair to ask and then sulk about it.”

“What are you talking about?” Jack asked.

“It was your idea to break up the ride by telling secrets.”

“Like my sharing the deep, dark secret that when I was nine, me and my cross-eyed cousin Cindy would sneak into the garage and show each other our hairless privates?”

“I think it was more what I told you.”

“You mean, since I’d mentioned cousins, your story about a sailing lesson with a cousin you’d always had a crush on …”

“Uh-huh.”

“… At the family cottage in Wisconsin the summer you first streaked your hair blonde when you were—seventeen?”

“Eighteen.”

“Eighteen, wearing a green bikini, and he says the color goes great with your hair, and then asks what color your pubic hair is, and if he’ll ever see it, and the two of you end up making the Sunfish rock out there in the middle of Moon Lake, and later he says, thank god neither of us gets sea sick. You think that’s bothering me?”

“You got quiet after that.”

“I’ve been driving all day, give me a break. That was cute about sea sick.”

“We weren’t having a competition,” Renee said.

“Good thing, too, since I don’t have anything to top incest.”

“For the record, you added that part about the green bikini. I never specified. Green is your favorite color.”

“Well, that changes it completely,” Jack said.

Sudden splats of mustard and yolk streaked across the windshield that Jack had industriously squeegeed clean at the Shell station. He gripped the wheel with both hands as if navigating through a blizzard that required total concentration.

“God! Can you see the road?” Renee asked. “Try the wipers.”

“You want to resist spraying with wiper fluid,” he said. “I made that mistake once.”

Once, when he was crazy about a little druggie named Belle he’d met in college in Chicago. She’d moved away without warning, then, after weeks of silence, called to say she was in New Orleans. Jack was driving through Mississippi, straight through without sleep, in a rusted Ford he’d traded his Harley for, doing ninety down vaporish blacktop so he could tell her to her face he loved her. She didn’t know he was coming; he’d surprise her. She hadn’t mentioned her address; he’d find her. Everything he owned was in the car. The perspective a blazing glare, but a smell through open windows like a cellar door ajar, and from the slough bordering the road, a steady chirp that matched the chirp of worn brake shoes rose suddenly to a whine (did he actually hear it then, or only in retrospect?)—just before the swarm—a chitinous comet with a tail of glittering wings—hit head on. He braked instinctively, wipers swiping bug sludge across the windshield, and when the swerving, blinded Ford bounced the shoulder, Jack felt it lean up to flip, then, in a way that recollection turned mystical and fated, the car caught its balance, and on all fours plowed through cottonwoods into the quagmire.

“I’m happy to drive awhile,” Renee said.

“I thought your neck is tense, that it was killing you. I offered to stop when we saw the signs for massage.”

“It didn’t read massage,” Renee said, “it said rub down. That’s how you know you’ve crossed the boundary into the Midwest. When the signs for massage start to read rub down. Anyway, it’s better. I took a muscle relaxant.”

“Exactly, and you’re not driving when you’re on drugs. And, by the way, if we could smell the Midwest, we wouldn’t need rub down signs to tell us. Did you know smell is the quickest path to memory?”

“Are you angry I’m not driving?”

“I’m not angry. I don’t mind driving, I don’t mind not being able to smell summer in Nebraska, I don’t mind you screwed a cousin aptly named Willie. Or that you’d never mentioned that a year ago when I met Cousin Willie and shook his hand at the family reunion, a reunion I never wanted to go to in the first place. In retrospect, you and cuz sure did a lot of nuzzling as the night wore on, and, OK, I admit that once everyone started drinking Rheingold beer and singing in German, the question of inbreeding did occur to me. But angry …”

Renee hit one of the passenger side buttons and rolled her window down. Jack was doing over eighty although Renee had told him that driving over sixty-five made her nervous, even when the traffic was light, because if a tire blew the car couldn’t be controlled. She’d had dreams about vehicles out of control. Wind surged in and Jack raised his voice to be heard above it. “No, not angry. All I am is quiet, Renee, meditative even. You can take a turn driving tomorrow.”

She looked to not be listening, one hand holding down her hair, as she stared out her open window. Wildflowers—white, pink, gold, too blurred to identify except for the blue cornflowers—dotted the embankment. Her other hand clutched the opened box of animal crackers as if they might be sucked out of the car. She released her hair, and even at its new, more mature, in-between length, it whipped wildly.

Jack opened his window, and the enlarging smell of fertile earth and baking fields streamed through the car. And yet its fragrance couldn’t be fully inhaled, as if they were moving faster than the speed of scent. Their hair blew about as it had when they’d first met. He’d owned a Mustang convertible then. Renee bought him a pair of pink, fuzzy dice to hang from the rearview, and they’d drop the top and joyride at night along moonlit two-lane back roads; her nipples would show against her blouse and sometimes she’d unbutton it and ride with the breeze fanning her bare skin. Once, she slid off her black panties and draped them over the dice and rearview mirror, and Jack told her, I hope we don’t get a ticket. For driving with no underpants? Renee asked.

For not being able to see where we’ve been.

“I’d have loved seeing you at eighteen in that bikini,” Jack said in a normal speaking voice that was lost in the roar of wind and rumble of the semis they were passing. Renee turned, looked at him, and shook her head to mean she couldn’t hear, then raised her window as they bore down on another truck. Jack raised his window, too. Beyond the trucks, he edged into the right-hand lane and slowed to a legal speed.

Renee yawned as if to equalize pressure in her ears. She took a long drink of water and passed the bottle to Jack, who took a quick swig and passed it back. “Want a cow?” she asked.

“No, thank you.”

“What do you want?” Renee asked. “Do you even know?”

“A kangaroo would be nice.”

“Do they make them? I don’t think they do. Why does it always have to be something exotic?”

“Look, you’re the one who asked what I wanted. So I tell you, then you criticize my choice.”

“What’s your second choice?”

“I don’t have one. If there isn’t a kangaroo then I’m just as happy with nothing but water. But please don’t let me stop you from enjoying the whole menagerie.”

“Wait … here’s one! I found a kangaroo!”

“You’re kidding,” Jack said. “Thanks.” He held it up over the steering wheel so he could study it without taking his eyes off the road, then, apparently satisfied, bit off its head. “The monkey is perfectly fine. How’s the kangaroo?”

“Sometimes nothing’s more lovely, I think, than animal crackers and cocoa to drink. Is that it?”

“Those could be the words, but I don’t know if you have the melody. I’m not sure I remember it or only think I do.”

“Someday we might not be sure whether we drove eating animal crackers or only imagined we did,” Jack said.

“But we are really driving and eating animal crackers, Jack, together on a beautiful afternoon. Sometimes all one needs is a bit of nourishment to change the outlook of the day. Feel better?” Renee asked.

“I do,” Jack said. He took another munch of kangaroo. “There’s nothing on a long haul like a little taste of down under.”