Relentless

the way I am, and there’s a reason I was born to you. There’s always a reason. We belong together.”
    Never had the nickname Spooky been better suited to him.
    “All right?” I asked Penny.
    She nodded. “All right.”
    When Milo smiled, I found his smile contagious.
    Clotilda took one egg from a thatched-reed basket full of them andthrew it on the floor. For a moment, she studied the splatter of white, yolk, and shell. “He’s right. If you don’t take him with you, we’ll never see either of you again.”
    From his perch upon the stool, Milo surveyed the ruined egg, then grinned up at his grandfather. “Grandma’s a hoot.”
    “She’s a hoot and a half,” Grimbald confirmed, and beamed with great affection at his bride. “I remember when I first saw her—such a radiant vision in the woods, on her knees, arms up to the elbows in a deer carcass.”
    A girlish blush suffused Clo’s face as she was swept away by this romantic memory. “After you shoot it, gutting it in the woods saves a mess at home later. But there’s always some danger that the blood smell will draw hungry critters. Your grandfather was standing in tree shadows, and when I looked up, I thought he must be a bear.”
    “She moved so fast, from carcass to rifle,” Grim remembered, “that I almost became her second kill of the day.”
    Both he and Clo laughed, and she said, “But then he blurts out ‘I have seen Diana, Roman goddess of the hunt and of the moon, here abroad in daylight and brighter than the sun.’”
    “Grimpa really said that?” Milo asked.
    “He really did. So I knew right then I either had to shoot him or marry him.”
    Having heard this story countless times before, Penny was less enchanted than Milo. “We’ve got a long way to go. Better get moving. Where’s Lassie?”
    “Probably in the potato bin,” Milo guessed.
    “I told you, sweetness, the bin’s empty,” Clotilda reminded him. “I forgot to fill it last month, and I used up the last for these home fries.”
    “That’s why she’ll be there, Grandma. It’s a cool, dark, quiet place, and it smells good. Sometimes Lassie needs cool, dark, and quiet.”
    In the northwest corner of the kitchen, two bins were recessed inthe stone floor, a pair of small concrete-walled vaults, one for potatoes and the other for onions.
    Clotilda, Penny, and I gathered around as Grimbald lifted the hinged wooden lid from the potato bin.
    In the four-by-five-foot space, four feet below us, comfortably curled on a bed of empty potato sacks, Lassie looked up and yawned.
    “The lid’s heavy. How did she get in there?” Clotilda asked.
    “The usual way,” I said.
    “And how is that?”
    “I haven’t a clue.”

   With a destination that required a long drive, we set out from the Boom stronghold into a world of dark and rain and trouble.
    I found the visit with Grim and Clo to be energizing, but the refreshment of mind and spirit faded soon after we were on the road.
    Because Penny had gotten a two-hour nap at the peninsula house, she somewhat recovered from the sleep lost the previous night when Shearman Waxx Tasered us. Giving me the opportunity to have a snooze, she drove the first leg of our journey northward.
    In the backseat, using a flashlight, Milo examined the items that his grandfather secured on the black market, while Lassie noisily sniffed them. He muttered excitedly to himself or perhaps to the dog.
    The windshield wipers should have been as effective as the shiny pendant of a hypnotist. By the time we were on the freeway, the thrum of tires should have been a sedative.
    In the best circumstances, however, I have difficulty sleeping in amoving vehicle. Arguably the primary shaping force of my life has been a curiosity about where I am going, not in a day or a week, but a curiosity about where ultimately I might be going. The forward motion of a car stirs in me this lifelong inquisitiveness, which is as much a yearning as it is a need to know, and mile by mile I grow more restless for revelation.
    Eyes closed, I said to Penny, “Sometimes I worry about Milo. At the stronghold, I realized you had a childhood like his. Homeschooled. No friends your age. Your world limited to family, a kind of isolation. What were the negatives of a childhood like that?”
    “None,” she said without hesitation. “Growing up in a loving family, with parents who have a sense of humor and common sense and a sense of wonder—that’s not isolation, that’s a