She looked from the big brown truck to the little gray truck parked next to it. “Like my truck, do you mean? My truck’s a girl truck?”

“No, your truck’s an old man’s truck.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s rusty and all the bumpers are dented and it needs a ring job and a front-end alignment and you have to hold the door on the canopy open with a bungee cord and add a quart of oil with every second or third gas tank, but it still runs. That makes it an old man’s truck.”

“Ah. So big trucks are boy trucks and little trucks are girl trucks, except for little trucks that need paint jobs, which are old men’s trucks.”

“Yes,” he said. “Except for any truck of any size painted banana yellow.”

“Oh.”

“Or lipstick red.”

“Uh-huh,” she said.

“Then it’s a girl truck.”

“Right.”

Except for the subject matter, it had been a repeat of one of those nothing and everything conversations they had so delighted in when they had first met, three years and a lifetime ago. In the interim, he had lost his wife and his son to a drunken driver, and very nearly his job as well, and she had acquired a new home, an air taxi and an adolescent son. They were still getting to know each other, feeling their way, on a direct heading, he hoped, for a permanent relationship, formalized by the local magistrate and vows, the whole nine yards.Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be, The last of life, for which the first was made. Browning, not his favorite poet, but this time right on the mark.

The front door of the house was unlocked, and he padded down the hall.

Someone was already in the bathroom. He looked around and saw that Tim’s door was still closed. Employing the covert tactics taught him at the trooper academy in Sitka, he opened Tim’s door and saw the boy deeply asleep beneath a tangle of blankets, a book open on the floor next to his bed, noise coming from a set of headphones that had slipped from his ears.