“You’re clear,” I said. “Go.”

The engine throbbed as Marlinchen swung into the opposite lane. The rpm needle jumped, and the speedometer began climbing: 70, 75, 80. There was that interminable moment, the one where you feel like you’ll never draw clear of whatever you’re passing, no matter how slow it was going a minute ago. We crawled forward. On the horizon, a small white blur appeared. An approaching vehicle.

Marlinchen did what I’d half known she would. The engine noise dropped to a low hum, the rpm falling. She wanted to cut back in.

“No!” I told her sharply. “You’re committed, remember?”

The rpm noise pitched higher again, and the speedometer climbed to 90. Then 95. We cleared the front end of the tractor. Marlinchen kept the accelerator down; 100 miles per hour. She glanced back to the tractor.

“You’re clear,” I said. “Get back over.”

With visible relief, she did. A moment later, a white pickup whizzed past us. It hadn’t even been close, really.

“Oh, wow,” Marlinchen said. She took a deep breath and let it out. Then she looked in her rearview and waved gaily back at the tractor’s driver, as though he’d done her a great favor. “That was kind of fun.”

“ ‘Fun’ is not a familiar feeling to you, is it?” I asked her. “Do you want to pull over and put your head between your knees until it passes?”

“Oh, shut up,” Marlinchen said, and broke into a high string of giggles at her own boldness. I laughed, too.

“You think you’re a real badass now, don’t you?” I said. “That was nothing. When I was your age-”

“Here it comes,” she said good-naturedly.

“- my friend Garnet Pike and I were learning to do a fishtail 180, also known as a bootlegger’s turn.”

“I don’t know what either of those things are,” she said.

“It’s a 180-degree turn you do using the parking brake while cranking the wheel around hard. You can’t do it with a lot of the cars they make today, with high centers of gravity. Garnet had read about it and wanted to try. So she talked me into borrowing my aunt’s car, a sedan with a good engine, and we went out to the airport.”

“The airport?” Marlinchen said.

“You’re thinking of MSP. This was just a rural airport, one runway, no tower. And in the evening, when we went, no one was taking off or landing.” I backpedaled slightly. “I’m not saying we should have done it. It was trespassing.”

“In other words, don’t try this at home,” she said.

“Right. Anyway, the runway was the perfect spot to practice, both long and wide, with nothing to hit. After two false starts, Garnet got up her nerve and did it. And back then, whatever Garnet did, I felt I had to do,” I said. “So we switched places, and I did.”

For a moment I was back there, hearing the sound of my own giddy, relieved laughter, seeing the little scented pine tree rocking crazily from Aunt Ginny’s rearview mirror. To this day, it’s what I think of when I smell that synthetic pine scent.

“Let me guess,” Marlinchen said. “You want to teach it to me.”

I shook my head. “No, I know you’re not ready for that. But I’ll do a demonstration for you.”

“No, thank you,” she said firmly. “I’d toss my cookies.”

“No you wouldn’t,” I said. “It’d be over before you knew it. In fact-”

“Look, a Dairy Queen!” Marlinchen interrupted, excited by a red-roofed shack on the roadside. “Can we stop?”

“You’re driving the car,” I said.

A short while later, we were sitting at a shaded spot overlooking the St. Croix River. Marlinchen had driven us there while I held her large, semiliquid ice-cream confection and my own order of onion rings. Ahead, the sun was shining on the river, but behind us, iron-colored clouds were piling up in the west. The contrast was so stark it almost looked like the thunderheads had been added into the scene with a moviemaker’s computer graphics.

“Going to be some weather tonight,” I said. “A storm, maybe hail.”

Marlinchen spooned up some of her ice cream. “The big storms used to scare me when I was a kid,” she said. “One of my first memories is of lightning striking the house. I didn’t see it, I just remember the noise, and how scared my mother was. For years after that, any loud noises scared me,” she said.

“It was that bad?”

“I don’t think I would have been affected by it so badly if my mother hadn’t been,” Marlinchen said. “She came into my room, crying, and told me ‘Lightning struck the house’ and put me straight to bed. I started crying, because she seemed so upset. I thought she meant that lightning was going to strike the house again and again. She slept in the bed with me that night.”

Elisabeth Hennessy had drowned under suspicious circumstances, with whispers of suicide surrounding her death. Her daughter’s memory made me wonder if Marlinchen’s mother had been troubled throughout her young life, if a highly tuned nervous system had turned the excitement of Minnesota ’s summer thunderstorms into terrifying psychodramas.

“Is something wrong?” Marlinchen asked me.

“No,” I said. I couldn’t think of a tactful way to ask whether Elisabeth Hennessy had been fearful or neurotic, so I filed away the issue for another time.

“How old were you when your mother died?” Marlinchen asked me.

I hoped my surprise didn’t show on my face. She was something of a mind reader. Not spot-on, but close. “I was nine,” I said. “Almost ten.”

Marlinchen paused with her plastic spoon halfway to her mouth. “The other day, I thought you said you came to Minnesota when you were 13,” she remarked. “What happened in between?”

I’d told the story of my migration to Minnesota to a number of people, and none had asked that specific question. Until now.

“I told you my dad was a truck driver, right?” I said. “He was on the road a lot. But until I was 13, my older brother, Buddy, lived at home. Then he joined the army and moved away, so I would have been living alone. That was mostly why. But also…” I hesitated.

“What?”

“That summer, I think, a girl went missing. She was about my age, and in a small town, things like that cause a real panic.” A waterbird swept low over the river. “I haven’t thought about that for years.”

“Why not?”

“It was a long time ago. I was young.” I shrugged. “Anyway, that might have had an influence on my father’s feelings. Besides that, I was becoming a teenager. My father probably thought I needed a feminine influence.”

“I see,” Marlinchen said dryly. “So it was your aunt’s feminine influence that led you to break into airports and practice stunt driving?”

“Right,” I agreed. “Ginny was the mellowest aunt ever. She worked evenings and weekends at a bar and grill, and she mostly let me do my own thing. Want one of these?” I held out the onion rings, and she took one.

“Thanks. So is your aunt still up on the Range?” she asked.

“No, she died when I was 19, of a stroke. Not like your dad,” I added quickly, seeing Marlinchen’s little twitch of reaction. “Hers was down in the brain stem, where a lot of the body’s autonomic functions are. If there’s such a thing as a good location to have a stroke, that’s not it.”

After a few minutes, when Marlinchen had finished her ice cream, I got to my feet. “Come on,” I said, “let’s head out.”

We walked down to the car together in silence. This time, I got behind the wheel, and at the end of the dirt lane we’d followed to our vantage point, I turned north instead of south onto the road.

“Aren’t we going the wrong way?” Marlinchen said as we continued to accelerate.

“Yes,” I told her. Then I hauled up on the parking brake and turned the wheel hard. The Nova slewed in a 180, back wheels drifting briefly onto the shoulder, and then we were heading west, picking up speed again.