Thinking about him, and his worried look, and those lines on his face, makes Sally even more nervous. Once she’s inside the motel office, she rearranges the strap of her purse over her shoulder; she runs her tongue over her lips. She feels like somebody who’s stepped outside her life into a stretch of woods she didn’t even know existed, and she doesn’t know the pathways or the trails.

The woman behind the desk is on the phone, and it seems she’s in the middle of a conversation that could go on for hours.

“Well, if you didn’t tell him, how could he know?” she’s saying in a disgusted tone of voice. She reaches for a cigarette and sees Sally.

“I’m looking for Gary Hallet.” Once Sally makes this announcement, she thinks she must really be crazy. Why would she be looking for someone whose presence spells calamity? Why would she drive over here on a night when she’s so confused? She can’t concentrate at all, that much is obvious. She can’t even remember the capital of New York State. She no longer recalls which is more caloric, butter or margarine, or whether or not monarch butterflies hibernate in winter.

“He went out,” the woman behind the desk tells Sally. “Once a moron, always a moron,” she says into the phone. “Of course you know. I know you know. The real question is, Why don’t you do something about it?” She stands, pulling the phone behind her, then lifts a key from the rack on the wall, and hands it over. “Room sixteen,” she tells Sally.

Sally steps back as if burned. “I’ll just wait here.”

She takes a seat on the blue plastic couch and reaches for a magazine, but it’s Time and the cover story is “Crimes of Passion,” which is more than Sally can bear at the moment. She tosses the magazine back on the coffee table. She wishes she had thought to change her clothes and wasn’t still wearing this old T-shirt and Kylie’s shorts. Not that it matters. Not that anyone cares what she looks like. She gets her brush out of her purse and runs it through her hair one last time. She’ll just tell him, and that will be that. Her sister’s an idiot—is that a federal offense? She was warped by the circumstances of her childhood, then she went out and screwed things up for herself as an adult to ensure that it would all match. Sally thinks about trying to explain this to Gary Hallet while he’s staring at her, and that’s when she realizes she’s hyperventilating, breathing so quickly that the woman behind the desk is keeping an eye on her in case Sally should pass out and she has to dial 911.

“Let me ask you this,” the woman behind the desk is saying into the phone. “Why do you ask me for advice if you’re not going to listen to it? Why don’t you just go ahead, do whatever you want, and leave me out of it?” She gives Sally a look. This is a private conversation, even if half of it is going on in a public place. “You sure you don’t want to hang out in his room?”

“Maybe I’ll just wait in my car,” Sally says.

“Super,” the woman says, shelving her phone conversation until she has her privacy back.

“Let me guess.” Sally nods to the phone. “Your sister?”

A baby sister out in Port Jefferson, who has needed constant counsel for the past forty-two years. Otherwise, she’d have every single credit card charged to the max and she’d still be married to her first husband, who was a million times worse than the one she’s got now.

“She’s so self-centered, she drives me nuts. That’s what comes from being the youngest and having everyone fuss over you,” the woman behind the desk announces. She’s slipped her hand over the mouthpiece of the telephone. “They want you to take care of them and solve all their problems and they never give you the least bit of credit for anything.”

“You’re right,” Sally agrees. “Being the baby does it. They never seem to get over it.”

“Don’t I know,” the other woman says.

And what of being the oldest, Sally wonders as she goes outside, stopping at the vending machine beside the office to get herself a diet Coke. She steps over the rainbow-edged pools of oil on her way back to her car. What if you’re forever trapped into telling someone else what to do, into being responsible and saying “I told you so” a dozen times a day? Whether she wants to admit it or not, this is what Sally has been doing, and she’s been doing it for as long as she can remember.

Right before Gillian had her hair chopped off, and set every girl in town marching into beauty shops, begging for the very same style, her hair had been as long as Sally’s, perhaps a bit longer. It was the color of wheat, blinding to look at under the sun and as fine as silk, at least on those rare occasions when Gillian chose to brush it. Now Sally wonders if she was jealous, and if that was why she teased Gillian about what a mess she always looked, with her hair all bunched up and knotted.