The rental car already smells like old cigarettes and Raspberry Hubble-Bubble bubblegum. For years after, those smells will make Sophy vaguely carsick. Sophy has dug herself into Gary's old Oliver Twist. Oliver Twist is a 1952 hardback that smells like dust and dead silverfish. Sophy is stubborn, reads every word.
Ione stares hard at the road.
She is driving them to Connecticut to see her ex-husband Chard and his family. She is choky in her throat but her eyes are just plain empty. She knows she is moving forward in time and backward in husbands but she feels she is not moving at all. The view sure isn't changing, out the window-just the road and the forest beside it, the skinny East Coast trees. Sometimes Sophy asks Ione about the hard words.