Everything seems wrong, especially the music, a-ha on the radio singing, “Take On Me.”

My daughter has her own music and earphones and cell phone. She has her new boyfriend whose fetus she has not yet been aborted.

But we aren’t going there. Not yet.

We drive.

I check the rearview every few moments, worried that my daughter’s ramshackle furniture will come loose from the back of the truck. I was never a boy scout. Instead I stole things. I had a bug collection. I never learned how to tie a proper knot.

The university is ninety more miles over the pass, across a road that winds like a very long eel. I pick up speed five mph at a time.

My daughter’s mother said it’d be good if I were the one to get our girl situated. “You need to talk,” she said. She was always telling me that, in one form or another.

Before we signed the divorce papers, she and I attended a pair of counseling sessions. “All I ever wanted was for you to talk to me, to tell me what goes on in that mind of yours,” my wife said. But by then she had a boyfriend herself and she spoke the words to the counselor instead of me, her face stricken and desperate. “That’s all it would have taken.”

At the summit slope I round the corners sharp and fast. There it goes: a bean bag chair shooting free. Then an armoire whose landing is catastrophic, planks breaking like bones. My daughter looks up at me with her ear buds still stuffed. I give her a thumb’s up. When she eye-rolls, there’s not the slightest trace of irony or charm in her expression.

The flat screen goes next. It catches a swig of wind and flies like a sleek chrome sled over the mountainside, downward and away.

I think of words. I resort them, mix and matching sentences in my head, practicing what I will say.

The Spiders in My Room

That night he stared at the ceiling waiting for the hairy spider to appear. He knew spiders weren’t nocturnal, but this one was.

Half past midnight the gray coat arachnid appeared, his spiked fingers already busy weaving the same designs in the same corner. What an industrious fellow, thought Dave. “Fellow” was not a word Dave used, yet soon enough he’d be trying many new things, so why not start with vocabulary?

For twelve nights running Dave had knocked the hell out of that furry spider, using a broom to whisk him and his handiwork to the floor in a mini, gauzy ball. Still, the goddamn creature kept coming back for more.

A girl that persistent worked at the bookstore for a spell. Kinsey was her name, Kinsey with jet-black hair in a fishbowl shape with a door cutout where her pretty face sat. She wasn’t much for small talk. She moved quickly, even though her limbs were short and chubby. She’s onto college now, taking creative courses no doubt.

Dave had every intention of being a writer himself. That’s how he could explain working at the book store for so long. “Free research,” he’d say, but then they’d look at him sideways, thinking, Dave realized later, “Internet, you idiot.”

The truth was Dave loved books–their cauliflower smell, their covers glossy and provocative; trying almost pornographically to catch anyone’s attention, even a child’s.

It started with a book, too.

On break, Dave enjoyed reading in the café area. Bosses never minded because Dave was careful not to spill or drool while he snacked. In fact, no one noticed him while he read.

One day Dave only got to the juicy middle of a Poe story—“The Fall of the House of Usher”– so he took the book home meaning to return it in the morning, but after he’d finished the tale there were others in the volume just as eager to be consumed, so Dave held onto it.

Done, Dave set the paperback on the make-shift shelf and saw how lonely it looked. The next day he brought home a few hardbacks, and then added an assortment in the following weeks. He told Laurel he’d been promoted, that his raise came in the form of an enlarged discount equaling one hundred percent.

And that might have been enough, if he hadn’t been caught. There were only so many crafty ways to reconcile the registers.

Now he whispered into the pillowcase, “Stupid spider.”

Laurel was asleep beside him. The mattress rumbled. He couldn’t tell if it was gas or the baby rummaging, already so eager to escape the womb and enjoy freedom. If only Dave could warn the fetus, if only he could take it all back.