Weekend

On a sunny Saturday morning in July, Thomas and Vanessa, both in their mid-twenties, sat side by side in Thomas’s Toyota, the car he’d bought when he started at the university four years earlier, and it was old even then. They were on their way to visit his mother, and although Vanessa had spoken with her on the phone many times during the two years she’d been living with Thomas, they had never met. The car rattled, and Vanessa tried to find the source by placing her palm on sections of the dashboard. “I hate that sound,” she said.

The sky above, seared by the circle of sun, filtered to the palest blue at the horizon. The road between Kingston and Ottawa stretched in front of them in long, straight miles of gray pavement. “Monotonous,” Vanessa said.

Thomas turned to her and smiled. “Who, me?”