He got back on the highway, with Faith making loud bird noises, her head moving from window to windshield as though she were looking for something. He kept thinking he could just drive on, drive and drive until he got somewhere flat and stale and safe, Nebraska, maybe, or Kansas. He'd never been to either place, never been anywhere, really, but somehow they sounded like places where you could get a little apartment and tell people your wife had died and take your daughter to school without much fuss or many questions. A rest stop flew by, then an exit, then another. He figured there were times in everybody's life when they thought, just for a moment, that they could be different than they were. He'd had one of those times years ago, when he'd won that middle-school science prize with some experiment about fruit flies. He'd seen the ribbon on his little arrangement or corrugated cardboard and all Ball jars, and that night lying in bed he'd imagined a future: "Nice job, Skip - ever think about medical school?" "Yo, Skip, man, can I copy your homework?" "Skip, come on over to my house and study." Maybe there was a way he could have made that happen; he still didn't know. He taped the ribbon to the wall over the card table he used as a desk, and then, when his aunt and uncle painted his room one summer, it had disappeared. That was all right, too, because seeing it just reminded him that it was kind of a fluke. Like Faith had been, a burst of something incandescent in a long stretch of gray days.