A few summers ago, a day after someone caught a huge white shark on rod and reel off Montauk and it was all over the news, Paul Freyer called and wanted me to come out there. He didn’t have anything to do with the shark but he said he had something much better to show me.

            I hadn’t heard from Paul in years. He had been my best friend at Seaver, a small college upstate. After he had a breakdown and left, I took up with his girlfriend, Gina, who in fairness, I had known first. She and I had gotten married after graduation. After some years in the corporate world for me, and in a therapy practice for her, we were living and working on her family’s vegetable farm on the North Fork, not so far away.

            “What’s the deal with that shark?” I asked, wondering how he had gotten my cell number; but of course, by then it had become easy to find someone. “The guy was trying to land it for what... six hours?”

            “You really want to see something? Really want to hear a fish story?” Paul said.

            “I thought you hated to fish.”

            “Fishing isn’t shit. Catching is what matters.”

            “You know,” I said, “It’s a busy time for us. All through August, into September really, with everything coming in.”

            “What are you? Coolie labor or something?” Paul said.

            Gina’s father and uncle, who ran the long-time farm, were as white as Paul and I. Most of the farm workers were from El Salvador and Guatemala. It was only Gina who was any part Chinese. It was her mother Mai Lin and father George getting older, and needing to modernize the farm’s operations, which had brought her home, with me along for a sometimes awkward ride.

            “Account management, mostly. They let me ride on a tractor now and then.”

            “You coming or not?”

            The three of us were freshmen together. Paul was one of Seaver’s “celebrity spawn”—there was the daughter of a Hollywood director, the stepson of a jazz bassist, the grandson of a corrupt Albany politician, and Paul Freyer, Jr., son of the famous painter. Gina was the cool punk Asian chick with the ripped black leggings, dark eyeliner, and pink-blonde hair. She played bass in the student band Rotten Red Razz. She brought work to the poetry class that she and I were in with lines about haunted boathouses, three-legged dogs, and poison choi sum. I was the shy and quiet rube from the Berkshires who hadn’t met kids like this before.   

            Paul left school the week before Thanksgiving our sophomore year. He stopped being able to discern language; he told me later that when people spoke to him, all he heard was a loud drone. He spent Christmas that year in a facility. That spring, he returned to Seaver and made a nuisance of himself until the administration banned him from campus, and he left again. The day after he left, Gina and I slept together for the first time.   

            Since then, a stretch close to ten years, we’d lost touch with him. We heard he’d moved to California at some point. That past February his father died and it was Times-worthy news. Now Paul told me when he called that he was living in the house on the southern fork of Long Island, the place where his father had painted his surreal seascapes.

Paul and I were next-door neighbors in the freshmen dorm. He had wild hair and a big beard and wore a long black coat and black cowboy boots. He drove a baby blue GTO convertible with a snow white top. He and I rode through the Hudson Valley, swigging quart bottles of beer, stopping in roadhouses along the way. It was while under the influence of both Paul and strong spirits that I climbed a water tower, jumped off the roof of the women’s dorm, and did other shit I would have never done without him. 

            Then he and Gina had gotten involved. Near the end of our freshman year in the spring, he moved into her room across campus. They would drive around in the GTO, Gina riding shotgun instead of me.

♣ 

            I scheduled my work so I could stop at some local fresh produce accounts on the way: a hotel in Riverhead, a restaurant in Sag Harbor, and a country club nearby. I was in the gravel lot of the restaurant in Amagansett where we’d agreed to meet ten minutes before he swung in. His black Jeep threw up a twister of dirt and grit over a cherry red Mercedes convertible, next to where I leaned against the trunk of my more modest Camry.

            Paul was shirtless beneath dungaree coveralls stained with white paint that were cut off, frayed, at the knees. Unlike me and my bald head, his hair was as long as it had been at college. His dark glasses hung around his neck by tied-together black shoelaces. The sun had shellacked him golden brown.

            As we walked towards the restaurant entrance he threw his arm around my shoulder, and yanked my necktie with his other hand. 

            “Look at you!” he said. “All grown up!”

            We got a table and ordered.  After the waitress left our drinks, Paul shook his head.

            “Joe… don’t tell me you've become a white whiner!”

            As loud voices and clatter surrounded us in the seafood shack’s open-air dining room, I gripped my glass of Chenin Blanc. 

            “Hey, it’s North Fork.” I nodded at his two bottles of sweating beer. “What’s with that?” I asked. “Afraid they’ll run out?”

            It reminded me of how much we used to drink at school. I wondered if he’d heard that Seaver was shutting down, after years of financial struggle. Instead I talked about jobs I’d had; the last one mostly, the pharmaceutical marketing. I didn’t bring up what it was like living at the farm among Gina’s family. I didn’t mention that being with him again reminded me that I had begun to think Gina was involved with someone else—a guy she knew from high school who kept coming around.

            “So… what are you up to these days?” I motioned to his clothes. “You back painting again?”

            “Yeah, lots of work to keep busy out here. Big house a few miles over. They want two coats.”

            “Well, at least you’re not out there wrestling sharks,” I said, tabling any talk of what either one of us once aspired to.

            “What a crock! What a bunch of phonies! They found it at the carcass of a pilot whale, gorging itself, and to keep it there, okay, the big heroes began chumming. Chumming! What sportsmen! When they finally threw out a line, the shark was already stuffed!”  

            Paul leaned forward, banging into the white Formica-topped table. His mane of tangled hair danced at his shoulders.

            “Let me tell you this. There’s a lot more than little fishies…okay? In the deep blue sea.”

            It was dusk, the moon on the rise, by the time we left the restaurant. The fresh salt air, lightly spun by a swirling easterly breeze, washed over me, and strapped in the open Jeep’s passenger seat, I stared up at the stars. I had taken off my tie and tossed it into the back of my car, which I’d parked in Paul’s dirt and pot-holed driveway.

            Looking at the house he’d inherited, I wondered why, if his father was so rich and famous, it was so rundown. It needed a new roof and a paint job and probably a lot more. I wasn’t looking forward to the accommodations that were probably waiting for me; I was getting too old to crash onto a pile of someone else’s dirty laundry and wake up to a beer breakfast.

            Paul took the dusty dirt road toward the ocean into a stretch of new and monstrous summerhouses, into an expanse of tall grass and dunes. I wondered not if, but how his father had harassed the newcomers to his neighborhood. I’d only met him once, when Gina had convinced me after Paul left school that we should try to find him. When we’d come down here, the only place we’d thought of, Paul Senior had lived up to his reputation.

            Ahead of us, a trio of deer, one large and two small, froze in the cone of the Jeep’s headlights. Paul stopped the car and stood up, pounded on his chest and gave a Tarzan yell. Startled, their eyes shining blind, the deer pivoted and peeled back into the surrounding cover. By the time we passed, there was no evidence of where they had entered the swaying tall grass.

            We drove to a well-known scenic overlook and smoked a thin and powerful joint Paul pulled out after we reached the water. It was the first I’d smoked in a long time and it jangled me, made the air seem more chilled. We got out of the Jeep and walked to the rise about the water. I sat down on cold damp rocks, Paul stood facing out to sea.      

“Come on!” Paul said, after only a few minutes, and we were off again.

We drove away, onto the main paved state road, and went into Montauk. Behind the restaurants, bars, and shops rose the rigging of the boats. Tucked in for the night, the fishing fleet and other craft bobbed at the wharves, while gulls on the night shift swooped and dove for scraps.

            We inched in traffic past the seaside food stalls and scrimshaw stands. It took time to adjust to the change in surroundings, the sounds and bright lights. A brass band playing Dixieland had drawn a crowd. Kids with ice cream cones carried like torches chased each other in the glow of streetlights designed in nautical motif. We entered a parking lot filled with campers and RVs, and pulled up behind a squat, green building that hung at the water’s edge.

            I assumed we were going into the building, a bar called the Fin’s Inn. At this point, on the fence about it, I started to regret having come out. I didn’t want to keep drinking; I’d had some problems with it, and the wine I had earlier was as deep in that direction as I wanted to go. I was leery about Paul’s old pull on me.

            He went past the bar though, and after a short walk, to a dock, set up with a locked door. Paul used a key and I followed him down the ramp. The wind fell off, and it smelled like low tide. We passed a pair of smaller pleasure boats and then a waterlogged dinghy. At the end of the dock was a small shack.

            “Wait here,” said Paul. “I forgot something.”

            I moved toward the shack as the dock rocked from Paul’s echoing steps back the way we’d come. Staring up at the fat moon, I noticed that the smell of the ocean was overpowered for a moment with something pungent that arrived with a shift in the breeze. It was rank in a land-locked way, like an over-filled portable toilet.

            Paul returned with a paper grocery bag under his arm. At the shack, he took out a key, and worked at the padlock on the door. As he struggled, he looked over his shoulder every few seconds. It came at me again.

            “What’s that smell?”

            Paul stuffed the lock into his pocket.  “Come in slow, and keep your hands in sight. You’d be nervous too if you’d been what he’s been through.”

            It had never occurred to me that someone was in there. I could hear the Dixieland band playing in the distance; civilization seemed far away. The paper bag, the boats, the high seas. Pirates! I thought. Smugglers! My head still full of dope, I thought drugs—it was a drug deal going down. This was why Paul wanted me to come out and I was now deeply involved in it.    

He slipped into the pitch-black shack. Then I heard my name.

            “Joe!” came the Devil’s muffled voice, his steamy urging.

            I pushed at the door and it opened wider, complained at the hinges. The air inside was like a punch in the nose.

            “Over here. Move slow.”

            I walked into the gloom. Deeper shadows conjured up by an oil lamp Paul had lighted flattened themselves against the walls. Whatever was going on in my mind must have put my face into a dopey grin.

            “That’s it, Joe, that’s good. Smile. Soothe the savage beast.”

            The uneven light danced with the pulse of the water slapping back and forth beneath us. I caught a glimpse of something. From the corner of the room, a pair of bloodshot eyes observed me.

            “Meet Gauguin.”

            “Gauguin?”

            “I call him Go-Go…. Keep your hands out!”

            I took them out of my pockets and made fists. There was a flurry of movement. I jerked back, tripped, threw back my arm to balance myself against the wall behind me.

            In front of me was an ape. A chimpanzee.

            He was black-haired, heavily muscled along the shoulders and arms, about four feet tall. He had a large head and the hair there was wildly uneven, shaved off in places. The chimp was wearing a pair of swim trunks, which even in the poor light I could tell were bright orange, like those a lifeguard would wear.         

He waved his arm and shook his hand. He gestured and grunted, creating a speeded-up movie short of shadow figures on the dimly-lit wall.

            “Hah, that’s a good one,” Paul said. As he came closer, I saw he was making signs too.

            I kept my voice low and tried to stay calm.

            “Paul…what’s going on here?”

            “Here, lay this one on him.” 

            He made a circle with his thumb and ring finger, raised his pinkie, and then shot a few more digits in quick succession. It was impossible to follow, let alone repeat.

            Paul pulled clothing from the bag he’d gone back to get. He tossed what he showed me was a “Fisherman Do It With Worms” tank top and a pair of blue jeans with rolled-up cuffs to the chimp, who immediately began feeling the fabric.

            “Let’s give him some privacy okay?”

            The air was fresher outside. I took a deep breath. In the distance came another song from the band. The stars were bright. If it was a dream, it was filling all the senses.

            “What’s going on?” I asked again.

            “Hey man…. We’re hanging out, just like old times.”

            “Paul….”

            “Let’s just say he was born of my loins. An unholy union of man and beast. Like Rosemary’s Baby. Before Mia met Woody.”

            “Paul, cut the shit.”

            “I won him,” he said.

            “Yeah?”

            “I’m thinking you’ll go and crank up the Jeep,” he said, “and I’ll see if he’s dressed and we’ll mosey on out of here.”

            I considered that. “Under the cover of darkness.”

            Paul turned and blew some snot out of his nose, then ran his hand through his long hair.  A small plane was droning up above us and we glanced up at its blinking lights. 

            Paul rubbed his bare chest under the dungaree overalls.

            “Hey, I promised you a fishing story, right? Okay. Guy I know…with a boat…came in. We were having drinks at the Fin’s. The guy’s a jerk, but he does all right, makes a living taking bigger jerks out fishing. Gets them so drunk they think they’re having a good time, and then after they’ve heaved on the high seas they don’t care about hooking the big one. Happy to come back to the bay and lift fluke off the bottom.”

            There was a bang from the shack.

            “They’re coming in woozy. One of the hardier jerks is going to get his money’s worth, he’s hanging off the stern barfing, but he’s trolling. Puke, fish, puke, fish. All of a sudden…maybe he is drunk, but goddamn! It feels like a whale!”

            Paul threw his thumb back in the shack’s direction.  I thought I heard the flapping of wings over my head.

            He looked down at his hands as if they were getting ready to speak again.

            “Somebody caught that chimp fishing?” I said, pictured some guy casting out a line with a yellow banana as bait.

            “What was he doing out there? Scuba diving? Or what,” I said, “water skiing?” 

            “Maybe, who knows?  He was off… what I think, a rich guy with a yacht, his fancy pet. Like those hip-hoppers and their pet lions, tigers, those people who keep boas, pythons, and they crawl out onto the local playground? Or maybe somebody lifted him from a zoo, got cold feet and tried to deep-six him. We’ll probably never know unless he tells us. All I know is that they hooked him, reeled him in. Treble hook of a Silver Scud on the big toe. Water-logged, maybe been out there for days. Guys who caught him were after tuna.”

             Paul held out his car keys. “How about you don’t ride the clutch?”

            I couldn’t think of any reason not to get the Jeep, since it was our only way out of there. Driving would give me some measure of control until I could figure out what to do. The only question was which way next.

            They were walking hand-in-hand by the time I drove up. Although there was some urgency, Paul took the time to carefully adjust the ape’s seat belt in the back seat. As I drove off, he hung his long hairy arms over the roll bar.

            “I won him arm-wrestling,” Paul said, once we were free of the village, having kept away from the tourist-filled streets. I got back on the state road.

            “Where to?” I asked. If we were alone, I would have called Paul on his bullshit, but the ape, strapped into the back and looming in the rear view, made me cautious. They could rip your face off. He seemed docile, and under Paul’s control. I guess I was too, as usual. Like when I climbed up a water tower behind him, shitfaced from a bottle of Chivas Regal Paul had stolen from somewhere.

            “It’s a good thing I won the arm wrestle. I bet a month’s free crewing on that fucker’s boat.”

            As I drove, Paul reached over to work something wrapped in a paint-stained rag from under the driver’s seat. He showed me it was a bottle of French wine, an old and expensive one. Gauguin spotted it, and started jumping around in the back. I thought of those chimps they had shot up in space.

            Paul opened the bottle with his Swiss Army knife. We drove past what remained of the area’s lush and aromatic potato fields, where the moonlight was brighter. We passed the wine back and forth.

            “As you’ve probably guessed, I’m going to make him into a waiter. The service is terrible everywhere these days. No one wants to work. The bottom line is I ain’t supporting him. He’s got to make his own way in the world.”

            I looked up. The silvery full moon was scarred with the dark blue-gray of its mountains, craters, and dusty seas. Paul directed me until we were back at the same place by the shore as before, surrounded by the tall dune-grass.

            We drank and talked, remembering crazy shit from school. He didn’t ask about Gina, and I didn’t bring her up. I thought he might mention his father; at college, his struggles with Paul Senior were central. Paul’s mother had committed suicide when he was six, and the women who came through when he was a kid sounded like they were more for Paul Senior’s needs than his. The boarding schools Paul cycled through sounded tortuous in different ways, but I suspected he was always a center of attention, just as he was at Seaver.  

            Paul and I wrapped ourselves in blankets he pulled from a storage area in the back of the Jeep, and fell silent. By that time, Gauguin and I had swapped seats; it was cramped in back, but this way I could keep an eye on him. The ape, well-behaved enough for me to almost believe he had been someone’s pet, was the first one who fell asleep. He snored, twitched, and his hands danced through some especially vivid dream. 

            I remembered when I’d come down with Gina to Long Island looking for Paul after he’d disappeared from school. After Thanksgiving break, she had found me in the library and asked if I knew where he was. I knew Gina only from that one poetry class; and I thought that Paul only had gotten interested in her because I talked about her so much. Since they’d gotten together, I’d seen less of him. Not being next door any more, I didn’t even know he was gone.

            She and Paul made a striking couple, and it wasn’t only the size difference between them. Gina was one of the few Asians on campus; Paul was the celebrity spawn who couldn’t help himself from being outrageous. But I knew from class that in spite of her punk rock posturing she was a serious student.  

            Gina said she knew where he went; after hearing the stories about his relationship with his father, I couldn’t believe that’s where he would go, but I agreed to drive down with her. She had been there before.

            It was windy, but not that cold for late November. A man, dressed in matching green work shirt and pants, came out onto the porch of the seaside house holding a rifle. You might have mistaken him for a farmer from one of the potato farms we’d passed. Except his clothes were covered in various shades of blue paint.

            We got out of the car and I called out, told him we were friends of Paul from school trying to find him, make sure he was all right.

            Paul Senior stood considering us. Finally, he told me I could come in, but “the little monkey girl” had to stay where she was.

            The house had a new porch that had yet to be stained and still smelled of fresh wood. Inside, the front room was warm from a wood stove, filled with canvases, paints, brushes, coffee cans, and rags; it reeked of solvents. A young blonde woman in a white bathrobe and wet hair, not much older than Paul and I and Gina, sat at the kitchen counter, flipping pages of a magazine. She was pretty but I was drawn to the canvas on the easel in the center of the room. The smeared colors were multiple variants of blue. I looked out the large window facing the ocean and tried to see where they could have come from.

            Paul’s father put the rifle back in its rack over the door. I followed him deeper into the house, where it was noticeably colder. There were three rooms, the last two opposite one another, both with their white wooden doors shut. Paul’s father opened one. 

            “I need this like I need another asshole.”

            Paul was asleep on a single twin bed, hidden under a mass of blankets, sheets, towels and clothes. He was on his side facing a wall that was in the process of being painted: either yellow to white or the other way around. Only the back of his head, all that black hair, was visible.

            Before Paul moved in with Gina and was still in the room next door, after hours of being awake, he would finally go to sleep. When he crashed, it might be any time of day or night. I would hear him through the cinder block walls, shouting out from his dreams. Other times, I’d hear him throwing up, heaving into one of the big plastic trash cans he’d brought in from the hall. He assured me that once all the medication got out of his system, he’d be fine.

            I considered telling Paul’s father at least part of this, something to explain his sudden appearance. Most parents would want to know. But although I was pretending not to be, I was in way over my head. Paul was my best friend in college, but I wished I was anywhere else.

            “The bottom line is…I ain’t supporting him,” the famous painter said. “He’s got to make his own way in the world.”

            I shuddered awake in the shotgun seat of the Jeep as the sun pulled itself out of the ocean, a brilliant red ball dragging morning with it, first light rising with the steaming mist. Paul stood in front of the Jeep. As I fully lifted my head, he grinned and began hooting and yelling. Startling me further, Gauguin scampered out of the tall grass, grabbing on and rocking the car before he jumped into the back.

            Paul drove the short way to his father’s house, his house now. He got out of the Jeep and hurled the empty wine bottle away, into the nearby dunes. Then, after he glanced down the driveway, he started sprinting toward the house, bare legs churning, hair flying.

            A blue and white police car whooped its siren and spun its blue lights as it rolled over the ruts of the driveway. The cop in the cruiser stopped beside the Jeep and stared at me. He worked his gum. Behind him came another police car and a van with Animal Control written on its side.

            I felt Gauguin working his hands through my hair, as if trying to pick my brain.

 ♣

            I could tell that the cops were disappointed in me when I repeated Paul’s story. They asked me to go over it a couple of times, but they were just fucking with me. They knew what had happened.

            The chimp was a dropout, a one-time star student at a primate research lab and language school associated with SUNY Stony Brook, who had hit a cognitive brick wall. The scientists had given him a chance to get back with the program, but when it was deemed hopeless, they sent him out for a head shaving, and got set for some exploratory drilling to see what went wrong.

            However, someone who was part of the project decided to adopt the ape at least temporarily, and that saved Gauguin (not his real name) from the operating table and scalpel. The human must have been good at his job: he had a house near the school, but also a summer place in the Hamptons, where the ape took up. A summer place Paul had recently finished painting.

            The Freyer family lawyer told me all this as he drove me to where I’d left my car at Paul’s place. He was an older man, maybe seventy, with age spots on his forehead and hands, and jet black hair that looked glued on.

            No one knew whether Paul took the chimp as partial payment for the paint job, a deposit on such payment, or simply for the hell of it. There may have been other possibilities, but Paul wasn’t talking. We had been together in the basement of the police station in their room with the bars, but he had rolled over on his side and gone to sleep. It reminded me again of the time I saw him in the bedroom at his father’s. Or the times he had crashed after days awake at school.

            The police decided not to charge me, probably due to the lawyer’s intervention, and showing his forgiving nature, the doctor who had adopted the chimp said he would drop the complaint against Paul if he could have one of Paul’s father’s paintings. Or no, make that two.              “He’ll go back to California,” the lawyer said, as we drove. “I’ve expressed my strong disappointment with them letting him out. You would think they would be happy to keep taking the money from the trust.”

            “Let him out of where?” I asked. 

            The lawyer cleared his throat and made a sucking sound that could have either been what passed for a reply or to deal with a loose bridge. We went down the rutted driveway to where my car was parked, near Paul’s Jeep. I looked at the house, wondered again what would happen to it, whether it might become some sort of historic landmark, fabled working space of the Great Man. Where the Great Man lived once upon a time with his son.

            “Never a dull moment. But I guess you know that, being a friend. A few days after Paul Senior’s funeral in February? That big nor’easter? He was out in the middle of it, nothing on but orange swim trunks. Out there directing traffic. Took every officer on duty to bring him in. Should have sent him back then.”

            I wondered about whatever hospital Paul had been in. Or whatever the “arrangement” was. Had he been there for all those years?

            I decided it was unlikely they would let me go back to see him. I suppose I could have written a note or something, something for the lawyer to give to him. I thought maybe that once he got settled, once he got to where he was going and things were more under control, I’d do something then, now that we’d reconnected.

            The thing was, I was relieved. Fine that I would probably never see my best friend from college again.

            Before I went to my car I walked to a rise at the west side of the property, overlooking a marsh. It was more or less where Gina had gone when we’d come down to find Paul, and his father hadn’t let her in. After I came out of the house, I saw her standing against the sky, her dark hair, undyed now and grown out, tossing in the wind. I tried to convince her that Paul Senior was just a prick, and wasn’t going to shoot her, and if she wanted to see Paul, I’d go in with her. She just wanted to leave. For good or bad Paul wasn’t alone. I have to admit, until then I thought there was still a competition between us for her—but this meant I had won. I couldn’t wait to get out of there with her.

            After the lawyer left, I called her. She was working with someone on the other side of the planet who was helping de-bug her new software, which was going to allow her to manage all the necessary administrative tasks for the farm. The program would make sure the payroll was right, the seed and fertilizer orders in, and the bills out. Mai Lin had kept the books, but it was an arcane paper-based system, and Gina was trying to bring everything into the twenty-first century.

            Gina isn’t a talker. She played in a punk rock band, but she was the bass player, solid underneath. Unlike Paul, she’s almost never told me anything I didn’t work at to get, which can be frustrating, but I’m used to it. She became even more of a listener, in her training and then over five years’ work as a therapist. I had never thought she kept secrets from me but since we’d been living at the farm, something was different. I’d come to believe she’d gotten involved with the guy she’d grown up with, who’d started coming around, and who I decided was the one getting the increased amount of texts she seemed to be sending.     

            I looked across the waving tall grass of the low dunes, to the huge house built behind Paul’s. His father’s place would be sold like every other old one, and leveled. Another monster would rise up in its place. All traces of who, famous or not, had been there would go away.

            “You’ve been in touch with him all along, haven’t you?” I said to Gina, after I gave her a short, bland version of what happened—saving the ape and the police for later—remembering all the suspicious texts.

            “No. Only since we saw in the paper that his father died. I gave him your number. I thought you needed to see him again,” she said, flexing her therapist muscles.

            The moon was still up, although fading from the day. It looked like someone had dabbed a quarter of it with white paint. Or maybe glue, and it was stuck in the sky.

            “Are you coming home, Joe?”

            She was the one who would stick by people. I was the one who had gotten involved with someone else, not her. It had been with a woman at the pharmaceutical company before we’d moved to Gina’s family’s place. It didn’t last long, only until I realized what I was risking. Gina—not Paul—was my best friend from college. And beyond. I couldn’t let her get away.

            The air inside my car was warm and stale. I put down the windows and breathed the morning’s cool air.

            From around me came the calls of the wild; birds sang, insects clicked back and forth. Somewhere hidden in the grass, deer were listening. Maybe a bunch of chimps were in there too.

            I looked behind me, saw my tie and took it out of the back seat and tilted the rearview mirror down. 

            My hands didn’t seem to be working. All grown up or not, it would take a while to get it right.

♣

May 21, 2024