* * *
They left at nine on Saturday morning, in Eric's car, not the truck, because the truck's radiator still wasn't right. The drive from Mesa to Tucson was about two hours down Interstate 10, a long straight shot through flat brown desert dotted with creosote and saguaros, past the outlet malls and the ostrich ranch and the cotton fields near Casa Grande, past the strange volcanic thumb of Picacho Peak rising out of nothing. Eric had driven it a hundred times. He had driven it once, seventeen years ago, with forty days of sobriety and a bouquet from a gas station on the passenger seat, toward a woman he had been certain was his whole life.
For the first hour, neither of them spoke. Tyler looked out the window with his earbuds in. Eric listened to sports radio without hearing it. Somewhere past Casa Grande, Tyler took out one earbud.
"Are you mad at me?" he said.
Eric glanced at him, startled. "At you? For what?"
"For doing the test. For wanting to meet him." Tyler was picking at a loose thread on the knee of his jeans. "For all of it."
Eric turned off the radio. The car was suddenly very quiet, just the hum of the tires.