He found this a little off-putting, since it was such transparent BS. Almost forty years ago, Richard and some of his friends had been bombing down a local road on some ridiculous teenaged quest and found themselves stuck behind a slow-driving farmer. One of them, probably with the assistance of drugs, had noticed a similarity—which, once pointed out, was undeniable—between Richard’s wide, ruddy cliff of a face and the back end of the red pickup truck ahead of them. Thus the nickname Dodge. He kept wondering when he was going to develop the aquiline, silver-haired good looks of the men in the prostate medication ads on their endless seaplane junkets and fly-fishing idylls. Instead he was turning out to be an increasingly spready and mottled version of what he had been at thirty-five. Zula, on the other hand, actually was looking great. Black/Arab with an unmistakable dash of Italian. A spectacular nose that in other families and circumstances would have gone under the knife. But she’d figured out that it was beautiful with those big glasses perched on it. No one would mistake her for a model, but she’d found a look. He could only conjecture what style pheromones Zula was throwing off to her peers, but to him it was a sort of hyperspace-librarian, girl-geek thing that he found clever and fetching without attracting him in a way that would have been creepy.