The big red SUV felt huge on the little streets now, a lumbering gargantuan machine from the future come to visit and terrify the past. He was going twenty and speaking to each of the houses, saying goodbye and goodbye, “and though you will see me around for a while, by next year you will look for me in vain for I will be away.” The fingers of his left hand made guitar chords on the steering wheel, and he was singing the sentences. He pointed at a little wooden bungalow with pale pink siding and said, “Oh, I ate pudding in your tiny kitchen when I was seven or eight with Bruce McDougal, who was in Mrs. Dennis’s class with me. Whoever heard of pudding for a birthday, not that it wasn’t good. Goodbye!” He named the houses as he drove and kept talking to them. “We knew each other well, or fairly well, or not at all, I’m not sure, but I recognize you tonight and so: goodbye.” He turned slowly onto Berry Street and stopped and then carefully backed his father’s red Cherokee along the Brands’ two-track driveway, a lane made for narrower vehicles.
