They walked in silence through the misty half-light to a grove of oaks along the wide slow Sacramento River. It was a cold morning; frost made the fallen leaves a sparkling carpet of orange and red and yellow that crunched under their feet as they walked. The air smelled of distant smoke, from farmers burning off the last of their fields.The clearing where Will had parked the Baker was another place they’d used to play. Jenny smiled in recognition, raising her gloved fingers to push aside a tattered strand of sisal dangling from a thick branch—the remnant of a long-gone rope swing.But when she laid eyes on the Baker—on the sloppy red and green paint, and the streaks of mud that still lingered from its dunk in the irrigation ditch—pleasant nostalgia gave way to outrage.“Just how much of my money did you spend on this heap?” she circled the Baker with a frown, eyeing the cracked leather of the folding top. “Pask took five hundred.”“Are you kidding? That’s more than half the price of a brand new Model T!”“As it happens, Pask does not operate a Ford franchise,”
