“Just put your full weight on me,” I said. “It’s fine.”

And then, within a moment, his body-all, what was it, 185, 190 pounds?-was laid out on top of me and pressing down. I felt his erection against me, the tops of my feet jostling the middle of his shins, his face to my right, his ear a seashell tunnel beside mine. I thought of the phone in my mother’s kitchen. How many times had it rung before stopping?

I brought my right hand up and ran it along his side until I found the edge of his T-shirt, then slipped my hand up under it and onto his bare skin. He grunted beside me, an animal waiting to be touched. Sarah had had a crush on Hamish, growing up.

“We can do anything,” I said.

It was as if I’d turned a key. He raised his head. His eyes looked dreamy and distant in a way I’d never seen the eyes of my best friend’s son.

“Sure, baby,” he whispered, and I tried not to hear the tone in his voice. A tone I was aware he adopted with the women I’d seen riding on the back of his motorcycle. They wore ludicrous shorts while wrapped around Hamish’s Kevlar-encased torso and legs. I tried to picture myself clinging on to him. He had more than once invited me to do so, but I had always declined. “He has the hots for you,” Natalie had said once, and the two of us had laughed together as we drove off to some sort of pitiless exercise class while Hamish peeled off in the opposite direction on his Japanese death machine.

His lips were pendulous, ridiculous, young. I reached my arm up and pulled his head down to kiss them. I was beginning to feel his weight, his bones against my bones. I would have wished it could be different than this, that I could have fucked my best friend’s son without having to be made aware of it. I tunneled into it, firmly now, as I realized thinking was not going to get me anywhere. Morality was just a security blanket that didn’t exist. All of it, what I had done and what I was doing, was not leading me perilously toward the edge of a cliff. I had already jumped.

I tugged upward at Hamish’s shirt, and taking his weight away from me for a moment, he peeled it off over his head. He was beautiful, his chest muscular and divoted, but his beauty was as much about youth and a life still ahead of him as anything else. I felt a stab of regret.

I turned my eyes away from his face and unbuttoned my pants. As he rushed to help, he bumped his head on the inside of the passenger-side door. It made a horrible hollow sound. I thought of Mrs. Leverton hitting the ground outside her house six months ago. How she had called through the bushes to my mother to get help. How the enemies had fleetingly bonded. They were desperate to be able to continue living on their own in their own houses.

Mrs. Leverton thought I was a degenerate, a failure as a wife who modeled nude for a living, but in one solid sense she was envious of my mother. Mrs. Leverton had a son who wanted to do everything for her, but “everything” was an assisted-living facility attached to a nursing home with a pricey hospice program. “Everything” was paving the road to her death with his money. He would line her way to the grave with gold when all she really wanted was to be allowed to die in her own home.

“Jesus,” Hamish said. He rubbed the back of his head and left my pants to fester around my ankles, the immediacy dangerously threatened once again.

I bit my lip. I writhed. “Fuck me,” I said, and hoped that no one’s God was watching.

This brought him back. He stared at me. “Wow,” he said. With a final tug, he threw my pants onto the gravel drive. I winced when he ripped off my underpants. They were not high waisted or gauzy or old like handmade paper, but his stripping me cut too closely to what I’d just done to my mother. I propelled myself up and grabbed for Hamish’s penis, which had poked above the waistband of his briefs.

As soon as I had my hand on it, I tugged him forward and down. He moaned in pleasure as I spread my legs and wrapped myself around him. “Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck!” he wailed. I lay there in disbelief. He had ejaculated on my stomach. My fingers, sticky and enraged, squeezed. “Ow,” he said, and placed a hand on my wrist. “Let go.”

He moved around, flattening one of my knees painfully with his ass, until he was sitting on the seat behind my legs with his own legs bent up in a tent above them. I smelled the fetid smells of the backseat, where the crisp scent of my greenmarket groceries mingled with the danker smell of my ancient gym bag.

“Shit, I’m sorry,” he said. “This is intense.”

I lay there. Suddenly I was beside my mother in the basement. Mrs. Leverton was coming down the stairs with After Eight mints spread out in a decorative circle on an old enamel tray. The phone was ringing in the kitchen, and Manny was upstairs dropping condoms like so much rain.

“Will you take me to Limerick?” I said, as if I were asking to be voluntarily committed to an asylum just over the hill. I would not look at him. Did not want to see his face. Instead I looked at the square-cornered tear in the back of the passenger seat and tried to recall how it had gotten there.

Hamish was kind, even if motivated by an unnecessary shame. “Do you want to wash up?”

“I’ll stay here,” I said.

I could feel him wanting to say something but resisting. “I’ll bring you a towel,” he said, and I nodded my head at him, both to say yes to the towel and to make him, for the moment, go away.

I lay in the backseat and listened to the night noises surrounding me, thought of fucking Jake in Madison in the VW Bug. Avery would come and sit for the girls, and we would go to a dark spot at the edge of the U-Mad campus and leave the AM radio playing low while we made love.

I wanted to be looking up at the sky, but instead I was looking up at the waffled roof of my Saab. The cool night air rushed in the open door at my feet, and I shivered, drawing myself up and turning over to lie in a fetal position and stare at the back of the front passenger seat, where my mother’s braid lay tucked inside my purse.

I had once read one of Sarah’s true-crime books that she’d left at the house. It was a book about a serial killer named Arthur Shawcross, and the most vivid thing in it, for me, was the portrait of a woman whom he had obviously meant to kill but who was too smart for him. She was old for a prostitute and still doing speedballs and getting high. She’d gotten high for three days straight after Shawcross tried to strangle her while raping her in his car. He was a man who picked up a prostitute, drove to a deserted spot, and killed her after he was unable to perform. She had known how to talk to him, known how to brace herself so that his hands, enclosed around her neck, could not produce the leverage needed to crush her windpipe. And she had known that her survival was connected intimately with his ability to ejaculate. It had taken hours, or so she said, and it was arduous, but he was grateful enough that he didn’t kill her and instead drove her back to the spot where he’d picked her up.

“How can you read such things?” I asked Sarah over the phone, brandishing, as if she could see me, the consumed-in-one-night book.

“It’s real,” Sarah had said. “There’s no bullshit.”

Hamish returned, smelling of Calvin Klein’s Obsession for Men, which it embarrassed me to know. He ducked in the backseat and held out a small blue hand towel. I looked at it in horror, but I did not reach for it.

“That’s okay,” I said. “I’m good.”

Again a quizzical look came across his face, but instead of asking me a question, he broke into a smile.

“You like having it on you,” he said.

“Hamish,” I said, sitting up and scrambling out of the car to find my pants and underwear, “your job is not to make me throw up.”

“Harsh,” he said.

“What I mean is that I’m still your mother’s friend, and your seduction lines are calibrated for women half my age.”