When I reached my car and looked back up the brick path to the front door, the light dusting of white powder on my chest and legs-the sugar from the pecan meringues, the flour from the Mexican wedding wafers-was the only thing that marked me as having been in my mother’s basement.

I wanted to weep, but instead I thought of where I could go. I had to relax. No one knew except Jake. What felt like other people’s knowing-the call to Avery, the questioning from Mrs. Leverton, the whispering of my name by Mrs. Castle-wasn’t. And no one would go into the house without me there.

I sat in my ancient Saab with the windows rolled up and placed my purse on the passenger seat, resisting the impulse to strap it in like a child. I put the key in the ignition and started the car. Slowly I pulled away, hunching over the steering wheel as if the streets were dense with fog.

Mrs. Leverton’s house was dark except for the timer lights her son had installed. The clock on the dashboard read 8:17. Time for old women to be tucked in. But apparently not old men. As I drove by Mr. Forrest’s house, I could see him reading in his front room. All his lights were on. He had never believed in blinds. At least in the old days, he had always had dogs. There he is, I thought to myself, an old man vulnerable to bullies and thieves.

I was sixteen that day in Mr. Forrest’s house, when I’d first seen color plates of women in various states of undress.

“They call them muses, Helen,” he had said as he watched me turn the pages of an outsize book called simply The Female Nude. “They are women who inspire great things.” I had thought of the pictures that stood throughout our house. Pictures of my mother in outmoded support garments or diaphanous peekaboo gowns, smiling winsomely into the camera.

The thirty-minute drive between my mother’s house and my own had always been an excuse for talk. Some people talk to themselves in front of their mirrors at home, psyching themselves up to ask for a raise or undertake a self-improvement project. I had always talked to myself most inside the car on the back roads that led from Phoenixville to my suburban faux colonial in Frazer. The halfway point, mentally, if not physically, was Pickering Creek and the small one-lane bridge that crossed it.

The night I killed my mother, I sang to myself in a low hum in an effort to create a sort of white noise in between me and what I had done. Every so often I would say, “You’re okay, you’re okay, you’re okay,” as I pressed more tightly on the wheel to feel the squeeze of blood that pulsed at the ends of my fingertips.

At Pickering, I waited on the Phoenixville side for a beaten-up Toyota to pass by, and as I crept over the bridge, my car lurched up briefly on the patched road. My headlights seemed to catch something moving in the limestone ruins on the other side. It looked like a man, lit up and dancing over the dark rock, and I shivered in my clothes.

On the other side of Pickering, the trees were thinner and denser, and struggled during the day to get any sun through the crowded canopy above. A decade ago, excavation crews became a common sight here, and I would drive by to see one hundred birch saplings having been mown to the ground. I hated to say that Natalie’s house, which was halfway between my mother’s and my own, was one of the McMansions that had been carved out of these woods. It shouted up out of the forest, with mock storybook turrets and a front door fifteen feet tall.

Natalie and the now thirty-year-old Hamish had lived inside this gingerbread palace for eight years, ever since Natalie successfully sued the manufacturer that supplied the tires to her husband’s truck. He had been idling on Pickering Bridge in a stare-down with another car and had revved his engine. His front tire exploded, breaking the axle and ejecting him through the windshield, and he hit his head on the old fieldstone bridge that had lain in ruins for more than a century. He died instantly.

Through the scrim of young white-barked trees that had grown back since the developers came and went, I saw Hamish lying in the driveway, one of his many cars ratcheted up, with a bright cage light hanging from the front fender. I slowed down and brought my car to a halt. Without a thought for what I would say when I saw her, I swung my car off the empty road and drove up the length of Natalie’s driveway. I seemed to be doing almost explicitly what Jake had told me not to, but I couldn’t stop myself.

As my headlights mingled with the glow from the broken car, Hamish rolled himself out on his mechanic’s dolly and motioned for me to switch them off.

I turned off the ignition and got out. My first steps were wobbly on the gravel drive.

Hamish ducked toward me, flipping his hair to the side of his face.

“Mom’s out,” he said.

I had never stopped thinking of Hamish as the boy who played with Emily in the sandbox in the community park at the end of my street. “Hamish is going nowhere-fast,” Natalie said in the years after Hamish Sr.’s death. She seemed happy about it. As if she’d lost one Hamish, but this Hamish was sure to stick around.

“Out where?”

“She’s on a date,” Hamish said, and smiled. His teeth were as white as stadium lights. Natalie had told me that he bleached them every six months.

I didn’t know which was stranger, that I found myself in the driveway of my oldest friend after killing my mother or that Natalie had gone on a date without telling me.

“I just remembered I wasn’t supposed to say anything,” he said. “Don’t tell her, Helen. I don’t want to get her mad at me.”

“No worries,” I said-two ridiculous words that I had picked up from an Australian-born administrator at Westmore. It applied to everything. “The kiln has exploded.” “No worries.” “I’m canceling Thursday’s Life Drawing class.” “No worries.” “I’ve murdered my mother, and she’s rotting as we speak.”

“Seriously, Hell,” Hamish said. He had picked up the nickname habit at Valley Forge Military Academy, where Hamish Sr. had forced him to go to develop moral fiber.

“I’m not feeling too well, Hamish,” I said. “I’m going to sit down.”

I opened up my car door again and positioned myself sideways with my feet on the gravel. I bent from the waist and propped my body up with my elbows on my knees.

Hamish squatted down beside me. “Are you okay?” he asked. “Should I call Mom?”

The light from the hanging lantern came beneath my open car door to illuminate what met the ground. I saw Hamish’s shoes in the dust and my own thoroughly filthy jazz flats. I edged them off with my toes while Hamish watched. I thought of the day in the basement when he had cupped my cheek.

“Will you lie on top of me?” I asked.

“What?”

I looked up at him, at his beautiful prematurely creased face, the freckles that peppered his nose and cheeks from too much time in the sun, his blazing white teeth.

“You trust me, right?” I said.

“Sure.”

I did not stop to wonder what I looked like. I stood up, and so did he. I opened the door to the back and crawled in across the bench seat.

“Get in,” I said.

I thought of my mother on the cold cement floor. I lay on my back with my feet hanging out over the drive. Hamish crawled in but sat on the edge of the seat with the open door behind him.

“I’m not sure what this is,” he said.

“I’m cold,” I said. “I just want to feel your body on top of me.”

I wanted to fuck him.

I closed my eyes and waited. A moment later, I could feel Hamish gingerly-too gingerly-place his body over me. He was bracing himself against the backseat and still resting most of his weight on the floor.

“I don’t know what you want,” he said.

“I want all of you on me,” I said, opening my eyes.

“Hell,” he said. “I’m…” He glanced down his body instead of finishing the sentence.