Linda pulled the car over to the side of the road. “I’m sorry,” she said, her voice soft and reasonable. “I was just trying to help. I just thought…”

Doug got out, slammed the door, and stepped in a puddle of freezing water which came up past his ankles. “Goddamit,” he yelled in shock as the water flooded through the holes in his worn tennis shoes. Then, turning around, he saw his reflection in the car window. He looked pathetic, lost. He opened the car door and got back in.

“What are you doing?” Linda asked.

“Let’s just go,” he said. “Let’s go to the interview.”

“I don’t want to waste your majesty’s time,” Linda said, the gentleness gone from her voice. She pulled the car out into traffic and made a U-turn in the middle of the road to take him back home. “I wouldn’t want you to miss your afternoon bong hit. I’m sure there are so many other useful things you could be doing right now if only I wasn’t forcing you to try to get a job.”

“You’re not forcing me,” he said. “It… it was nice of you-”

“Fuck you.” Linda began driving faster, speeding up to blast through a light that had just turned yellow. “Why don’t I just drop you off and you can get together with Kevin and that jerkoff roommate of yours and smoke pot all goddamned day for all I care. And if you see Kevin, you can tell him to go and fuck whoever he wants and not to bother coming home because I don’t need his sulking, moaning, bitching, lying ass around the goddamned house anymore.”

Wow. Linda was usually so soft-spoken and cheerful. Doug was trying to absorb everything she had just said to determine which of the many points she had just brought up needed to be refuted first. Did she really just call Mitch a jerkoff? Did she really think Kevin was fucking someone else? Wasn’t it a little hypocritical to attack him for that, all things considered? Perhaps that would be the point he brought up last.

“How come you think Mitch is a jerkoff?”

“I have had it with you guys,” she continued, ignoring him, her face filled with rage, an emotion Doug had never seen on her before. “What do you think I am, some kind of fucking…” She trailed off and Doug thought the anger was subsiding, but it turned out she was just searching for the right word. “… middle-aged goddamned English teacher trying to get you to sit up straight and not chew gum in class? I just don’t want to see all the people I care about flush their fucking lives down the toilet, but oh, no, I guess that’s just not cool, is it? No, anyone with a sliver of common sense is just a boring old nag.”

Doug was about to tell her she wasn’t old or boring, but fortunately for his sake, he never got the chance because she started up again. “You know what I’d like to do? I mean, I’m sure nobody gives a fuck, but you know what would really make me happy right now? If I could take Ellie and go back to my mother’s and get away from this… everyone in this… in this… goddamned…”

She appeared to have run out of steam and Doug felt the nicest thing he could say was to finish her sentence for her. “Town?” he ventured.

“Shut up,” Linda snarled at him. She was still driving fast, whipping around curves, and they were almost back at Doug’s apartment. She continued her rant without even looking at him. “You know why I don’t? Because I don’t want Ellie to have to start up in a new elementary school. Despite everything, with the pot and everything, I…”

And then she stopped talking, a bit too suddenly. Doug merely noticed that she’d fallen silent at first but after a few seconds the fact that she had stopped talking began to seem curious, so he reviewed the last things she had said. Ellie, new elementary school, pot. What did Ellie have to do with pot? The abruptness with which she had finished her rant seemed to indicate some kind of secret link which she had accidentally revealed before stopping herself.

“What are you talking about?” Doug asked, not really sure if he was imagining it, or if Linda’s demeanor had changed. She seemed suddenly defensive.

“Ellie.” Linda snapped. “I have a daughter. We, Kevin and I, have a daughter. Though you wouldn’t know he’s a father from the way he behaves.” This last bit she said almost by rote, as if she had said it before, and she probably had, Doug thought, to the women she worked with at the dress shop. The rage was gone; the rant was over. She was phoning it in.

“Yeah, I know you have a daughter,” Doug said. “But what does that have to do with pot?”

Linda took one hand off the steering wheel and waved it frantically, as if fanning herself. “Nothing,” she said. “Just ignore me.” Her voice was softer now but Doug thought she looked stressed, not cleansed by the catharsis of rage as he would expect.

“No, no, no,” Doug said, leaning forward in his seat with the look of a TV detective who had stumbled upon a clue. “You mentioned Ellie and then you started talking about pot. What does Ellie have to do with pot?”

Linda pulled up outside his apartment and stopped the car but left the motor running. She stared out the window and sighed. Doug wasn’t sure if this was his cue to get out of the car, as if his question didn’t deserve a response. Maybe it didn’t. Maybe he was just being even more of an asshole than she already thought he was. He fumbled for the latch on his door but just as he was about to open it, Linda said, as if she was clearing her throat to start a long speech, “OK.”

“OK what?”

“There are some things I didn’t tell you.”

Doug nodded. “Like, uh, what?”

Linda sighed again. “OK,” she repeated. “Don’t be mad.”

Despite himself, Doug chuckled. “What would I be mad about?”

“Well, um, you know how Kevin is always… um, thinking that you might have turned him into the police?”

“Yeah,” Doug said slowly, his brow furrowing now.

“Well, I know you didn’t.”

“Yeah. I know. We talked about that.”

“No, I mean I actually know you didn’t. I don’t just know it because you’re a cool person, or whatever, and I have good instincts. I mean, I know why Kevin got busted.”

“Really.” Doug was trying to piece things together. If she knew why Kevin got busted, why didn’t Kevin know why he got busted? Why did Kevin always have it at the back of his mind that Doug had something to do with it? Why hadn’t Linda just provided him with this tiny, yet extremely important, piece of information? “Why did he get busted?”

“Because Ellie brought some pot leaves into school for show-and-tell,” Linda said, and started giggling. “She thought they were pretty. She went down into his grow room and picked some leaves and told everyone in her class that her daddy grew these in her basement.”

Doug started laughing too. “Why didn’t you just tell Kevin this?”

Linda stopped laughing. “Because Ellie asked me not to. She was very upset.”

Doug nodded. “So, wait. My friend has been walking around thinking I turned him into the cops for a year because you didn’t want to upset a six year old?” He wasn’t laughing now either.

“It’s worse than that.” She sighed heavily and continued. “I didn’t want Kevin hanging out with you guys. I knew he was suspicious of you after he got arrested, and I thought, maybe he’ll start acting like a responsible adult now. So, I just let him go on thinking that.”

Doug let that sink in for a second. “So you think we’re a bad influence?”

Linda said nothing, confirming it.

“You know what I think? I think Kevin’s a bad influence.”

Linda looked quizzical. “What do you mean by that?”

“You know what we’ve been doing for the last two weeks? He’s not having an affair. We were stealing a Ferrari and it was his idea.”

“WHAT?”

Doug had hoped to see relief in Linda’s eyes now that he had confirmed that her husband wasn’t an adulterer, but instead was confronted with what appeared to be shock and rage. Exhausted by the seriousness of the conversation and his inability to control it, he burst out laughing and was glad when Linda started laughing too.