Kevin got away as soon as he finished high school. He went to college in another state, married there, and began to live quite carelessly with his young bride. They partied hard. They traveled thoughtlessly. Tracy was a little obsessive about air schedules, and Kevin couldn’t resist mocking her. Apparently he’d expended all of his tolerance for planning with his parents; it sometimes seemed to Abby as if he married a woman he could pick on because he’d been too easygoing for too long. He sniped at Tracy when she worried, which led to a lot of arguments between them, which fueled his drinking and drug consumption, but Tracy was into altering her consciousness, too, so they usually ended their evening groggy or passed-out together, and they stayed married.

Abby on the other hand tended to stay home, once she had a home she loved.

She went through two houses with two spouses but the third piece of real estate, with title taken as “an unmarried woman,” was the one with charm. She hunkered down with her dog and her son Matt. She ventured out easily for work, because she liked her job and she knew she would become mentally ill if she never left the house. She vacationed less willingly, nagged into it by parental or fraternal comments like “it just isn’t normal to stay home all the time,” or moved by the occasional idea that it would be good for her and her son.

It was Matt, in fact, who released her from homebodiness. He was twenty before he found the occasion to articulate it, but he finally told Abby that a vacation shouldn’t be so much work. He expressed a desire to go camping, and that sent Abby into paroxysms of list- and itinerary-making. “Whoa,” he said. “As long as we have wood and water, bags and a ground cloth, we’re good to go.”

So they went. Abby added a tent and some maps to the rudiments, but they took off rather carelessly in her old Maxima. They had a few days’ worth of firewood in the trunk, and a five-gallon water container in the back. The styrofoam cooler chilled drinks and fresh vegetables; paper bags held the groceries they acquired on the way to Mono basin. They camped a thousand feet away from an untraveled road, on a field of pumice, beside scraggly pines. They only needed the tent to shelter them from light, because the moon rode above them all the nights of that first trip, blazing enough to read by and blaring into their dreams.

Abby began to learn then, about the liberating pleasure of just going, of being prepared to encounter anything. She began to venture into adventures.

She never was able to show her parents the other way to vacation. By that time, her father had lost his balance and her mother had lost her patience, and they were neither leaving their home of forty years. But she did get to show Kevin. There came a season when his hard drinking caught up with him. He started abusing coke, again, and began to flip moods like a lunatic. Tracy wouldn’t take his passive-aggressive sniping any more, and he landed for awhile back in the company of his big sister.

Matt wasn’t any help. Abby soon discovered that her son had no respect for his uncle. When she looked at Kevin she still saw her sweet brother; she was startled to note that Matt saw a mean, sniping man.

So she tried to show Kevin what she’d learned. She took them on the road. She aimed her car for the high desert but first she made sure they wouldn’t be mooned. She selected the long dark weekend of August, and she parked them at the edge of a rock-bound hidden lake, on clear ground, near trees. Kevin’s nose started to bleed at 6,000 feet.

But the new moon didn’t blare at them. They slept outside under a star-shot bowl of black sky, and they made no plans. They couldn’t tell where they looked and when they dreamed.