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after fetching Beth. Lou would give her a big hug, make a comment about how thin she was, and then he’d use the drive home as an opportunity to discuss American peculiarities with Beth, such as urban blight, extreme poverty, litter, and modern segregation, a subtle, therefore more insidious, foe. His caravan of criticism was an important part of the cheerful trip to and from Detroit.
    “Sometimes, Beth Ann, I just don’t know how you can live in that country,” he’d invariably cluck at the end of a diatribe.
    “Lou, darling, I am an American. I make a lot of money in the television industry. I have friends who are unboring, an adorable Mexican boy who delivers my vodka and cigarettes to my door, a view of the Hudson River, more than eleven hundred square feet of high-end parquet that another Mexican, a lady, polishes once a week. And I have a second home, on a river, in a cheaper country, that costs me a few hundred dollars to get to every six to eight weeks, where I get my hair perfectly streaked,
for free
, where no one wakes me up before noon, and where I am surrounded by the people I love. And on the way
home
, to America, where I live, there’s the duty-free, the cherry on the top of the whole dang deal. Now my sex life could improve, but it’s doubtful Belle River could help me remedy that.”
    “Not that you haven’t tried,” I said.
    “Right. Otherwise, I’ve nothing to complain about.”
    “Buckle up,” I’d say to Beth in the rearview mirror, watching her light another cigarette.
    “Can’t,” she’d say, blowing smoke through the window crack,appearing more famous than the minor cable celebrity that she was. “Jacket’s linen.” Or she’d say, “These pants are crushed velvet,” or, “I’m not feeling right in the middle. Must have been something I ate.” Her explanation was that if she never wore a seat belt in a New York taxi and lived this long, surely she was safe with me behind the wheel.
    Sometimes, if she knew she’d be arriving in a particularly foul mood, some drama trailing behind her, she’d ask me not to bring Beau or the boys, because they made it impossible for her to smoke in the car. But I missed the part when Beth would head, head-first, into the Beth-sized space we would open between us. She’d duck into our huddle like a shy quarterback, or maybe like someone hiding, not wanting anyone to see that these were her folk. But the boys didn’t care about appearances. When she pulled into the gravel drive in the fancy convertible, they unselfconsciously bolted from the house, desperate to make contact with her and her car.
    Beau noticed right away that the rental was a foreign make.
    “Hope no one eggs it,” he said, winking at me. It was a protective county. Too many auto jobs in Windsor were reliant on the domestic market, even though a lot of the foreign ones were assembled in North America, I reminded him.
    “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “The profits go to Krauts and Japs.”
    “Don’t call them that. We won that war.”
    “Well, we’re losing the economic one, baby,” he said.
    Through the kitchen window we watched her park. The boys screamed with delight as the cloth roof of the convertible folded back, as though Beth was unwrapping a gift that contained herself.
    “Ta-DA!” she yelled, hopping over the door.
    Sam rushed her middle and Jake kept hold of the sleeve of her peasant shirt, looking into her face like she was the first Christmas tree he’d ever seen. Beth slapped open the front door carrying only a small leather overnight bag.
    “Hey, jackass,” she said, opening up an arm to Beau.
    “Nice mouth on you,” he said, lightly hugging her.
    “Fuck you,” Beth whispered, sweetly kissing him on the cheek.
    “Been there, done you.”
    That was their shtick to lighten the tension of their history as high school sweethearts. It wasn’t a big love, a long love, or a deeply profound love, but they were each other’s first, and that mattered