“This is ridiculous, Joey,” Walter said. “I can’t take this.”

“Sure you can,” Joey said. “The rest is going to veterans, but Connie and I think your cause is interesting, too. You took care of me when I was little, right?”

“Yes, because you were my child. That’s what parents do. We don’t expect repayment. You never quite seemed to understand that concept.”

“But isn’t it funny that I can do this? Isn’t it a pretty good joke? This is just Monopoly money. It’s meaningless to me.”

“I have my own savings I could spend if I wanted to.”

“Well, you can save that for when you’re old,” Joey said. “It’s not like I’m going to be giving everything to charity when I start making money in a real way. This is special circumstances.”

Walter was so proud of Joey, so grateful not to be fighting him anymore, and so inclined, therefore, to let him be the big guy, that he didn’t fight him on the check. The one real mistake he made was to mention it to Jessica. She had finally spoken to him when he’d landed in the hospital, but her tone made it clear that she wasn’t ready to be friends yet with Lalitha. She was also unimpressed with what he’d said in Whitmanville. “Even leaving aside the fact that ‘cancer on the planet’ is exactly the kind of phrase we all agreed was counterproductive,” she said, “I don’t think you picked the right enemy. You’re sending a really unhelpful message when you pit the environment against uneducated people who are trying to improve their lives. I mean, I know you don’t like those people. But you have to try to hide that, not lead with it.” In a later phone call, she made an impatient reference to her brother’s Republicanism, and Walter insisted that Joey was a different person since he’d married Connie. In fact, he said, Joey was now a major contributor to Free Space.

“And where did he get the money?” Jessica said immediately.

“Well, it’s not that much,” Walter backpedaled, realizing his mistake. “We’re a tiny group, you know, so everything’s relative. It’s just, symbolically, that he’s giving us anything at all-it says a lot about how he’s changed.”

“Hm.”

“I mean, it’s nothing like your contribution. Yours was huge. Spending that weekend with us, helping us create the concept. That was huge.”

“And now what?” she said. “Are you going to grow your hair long and start wearing a do-rag? Riding around in your van? Doing the whole midlife thing? Do we have that to look forward to? Because I would like to be the still, small voice that says I liked you the old way you were.”

“I promise not to grow my hair out. I promise no do-rag. I will not embarrass you.”

“I’m afraid the horse may already be out of that particular barn.”

Perhaps it was bound to happen: she was sounding more and more like Patty. Her anger would have grieved him more had he not been so enjoying, every minute of every day, the love of a woman who wanted all of him. His happiness was reminiscent of his early years with Patty, their days of teamwork in child-raising and house renovation, but he was much more present to himself now, more vividly and granularly appreciative of his happiness, and Lalitha was not the worry and enigma and headstrong stranger that Patty, at some level, had always remained to him. With Lalitha, what you saw was what you got. Their time in bed, as soon as he’d recovered from his injuries, became the thing he’d always missed without knowing he was missing it.

After movers had removed all traces of the Berglunds from the mansion, he and Lalitha struck out in the van toward Florida, intending to sweep westward across the country’s southern belly before the weather got too warm. He was intent on showing her a bittern, and they found their first one at Corkscrew Swamp in Florida, beside a shady pool and a boardwalk creaking with the weight of retirees and tourists, but it was a bittern without bitternness, standing in plain sight while the strobing of tourist cameras bounced off its irrelevant camouflage. Walter insisted on driving the dirt-surfaced dikes of Big Cypress in search of a real bittern, a shy one, and treated Lalitha to an extended rant about the ecological damage wreaked by recreational ATVers, the brethren of Coyle Mathis and Mitch Berglund. Somehow, despite the damage, the scrub jungle and black-water pools were still full of birds, as well as countless alligators. Walter finally spotted a bittern in a marsh littered with shotgun shells and sun-bleached Budweiser packaging. Lalitha braked the van in a cloud of dust and duly admired the bird through her binoculars until a flatbed truck loaded with three ATVs roared past.

She’d never camped before, but she was game for it and impossibly sexy to Walter in her breathable safariwear. It helped that she was immune to sunburn and as repellent of mosquitoes as he was attractant. He tried to teach her some rudiments of cooking, but she preferred the tasks of tent assembly and route planning. He got up every morning before dawn, made espresso in their six-cup pot, and carried a soy latte back into the tent for her. Then they went out walking in the dew and the honey-colored light. She didn’t share his feelings for wildlife, but she had a knack for spotting little birds in dense foliage, she studied the field guides, and she crowed with delight when she caught and corrected his false identifications. Later in the morning, when avian life quieted down, they drove some hours farther west and sought out hotel parking lots with unencrypted wireless connections, so that she could coordinate by e-mail with her prospective interns and he could write entries for the blog that she’d set up for him. Then another state park, another picnic dinner, another ecstatic round of grappling in the tent.

“Have you had enough of this?” he said one night, at an especially pretty and empty campground in the mesquite country of southwest Texas. “We could check into a motel for a week, swim in the pool, do our work.”

“No, I love seeing how much you enjoy looking for animals,” she said. “I love seeing you happy, after all that time when you were so unhappy. I love being on the road with you.”

“But maybe you’ve had enough of it?”

“Not yet,” she said, “although I don’t think I really get nature. Not the way you do. To me it seems like such a violent thing. That crow that was eating the sparrow babies, those flycatchers, the raccoon eating those eggs, the hawks killing everything. People talk about the peacefulness of nature, but to me it seems the opposite of peaceful. It’s constant killing. It’s even worse than human beings.”

“To me,” Walter said, “the difference is that birds are only killing because they have to eat. They’re not doing it angrily, they’re not doing it wantonly. It’s not neurotic. To me that’s what makes nature peaceful. Things live or they don’t live, but it’s not all poisoned with resentment and neurosis and ideology. It’s a relief from my own neurotic anger.”

“But you don’t even seem angry anymore.”

“That’s because I’m with you every minute of the day, and I’m not so compromised, and I’m not having to deal with people. I suspect the anger will come back.”

“I don’t care for my sake if it does,” she said. “I respect your reasons for being angry. They’re part of why I love you. But it just makes me so happy to see you happy.”

“I keep thinking you can’t get any more perfect,” he said, taking her by the shoulders. “And then you say something even more perfect.”

In truth, he was troubled by the irony of his situation. By finally venting his anger, first to Patty and then in Whitmanville, and thereby extricating himself from his marriage and from the Trust, he’d removed two major causes of the anger. For a while, in his blog, he’d tried to downplay and qualify his cancer-on-the-planet “heroism” and emphasize that the villain was the System, not the people of Forster Hollow. But his fans had so roundly and voluminously chided him for this (“grow some balls man, your speech totally rocked,” etc.) that he came to feel he owed them an honest airing of every venomous thought he’d entertained while driving around West Virginia, every hard-core antigrowth opinion he’d ever swallowed in the name of professionalism. He’d been storing up incisive arguments and damning data ever since he was in college; the least he could do now was share it with young people to whom it actually, miraculously, seemed to matter. The loony rage of his readership was worrisome, however, and discordant with his peaceable mood. Lalitha, for her part, had her hands full in sifting through hundreds of new intern applicants and phoning the ones who seemed most apt to be responsible and nonviolent; almost all the ones she deemed uncrazy were young women. Her commitment to fighting overpopulation was as practical and humanitarian as Walter’s was abstract and misanthropic, and it was a measure of his deepening love for her how much he envied her and wished he could be more like her.