“Oh,” she said. She gave a shaky laugh and clutched her tote bag to her chest. “I was just calling my cat,” she told him.

“Well, I haven’t seen no cat about. Sorry if I scared you.”

“You didn’t scare me!”

He squinted at her doubtfully. The satiny skin beneath his eyes glistened with sweat, which made him look earnest and boyish. “Anyhow,” he said. “Seems I’ll need to replace that flashing up top round the chimney. I won’t be doing it today, though; I got to get on back. So if those folks at the realtor’s phone, tell them I’ll be in touch, okay?”

“Okay,” Delia said.

He waved his clipboard amiably and headed past her out the door. On the steps, he turned and asked, “How you like my vehicle?”

“Vehicle?”

“Ain’t it something?”

It was, in fact. She wondered how she could have missed it. Big as a house trailer, painted a metallic bronze with a desert landscape lighting up one side, it occupied the whole driveway. “Got a microwave,” Vernon was saying, “got a dinky little ’frigerator-”

“You mean it’s for living in?”

“Sure, what else?”

“I thought vans would just have rows and rows of seats.”

“Ain’t you ever been inside a RV before? Shoot, come on and I’ll show you.”

“Oh, I don’t know if I-”

“Come on! This’ll knock your socks off.”

“Well, maybe I will take a peek,” Delia said, and she followed him, still hugging her tote bag. One section of the desert scene proved to be a sliding panel. Vernon slid it open and stood back to let her see inside. When she poked her head in she found gold shag carpeting halfway up the walls, and built-in cabinets, and a platform bed at the rear with storage drawers underneath. Two high-backed seats faced the windshield-the only sign that this was, after all, a means of transportation.

“Gosh,” Delia said.

“Climb in. Get a load of my entertainment center.”

“You have an entertainment center?”

“State of the art,” he told her. He climbed in himself, causing the van to tilt beneath his weight, and then turned to offer a hand as big as a baseball glove. She accepted it and clambered inside. The oily, exciting smell of new carpet reminded her of airports and travel.

“Ta-daah!” Vernon said. He flung open a cabinet. “What it is,” he said, “in the bottom of this here TV is a slot for a videotape, see? Integrated VCR. Evenings, I just swivel it out and watch the latest hit movies from the bed.”

“You stay here all the time?”

“Just about,” he said. “Well, more or less. Well, for now I do.” Then he sent her a look, with his head ducked. “I’ll tell you the honest truth,” he said. “This van belongs to my brother.”

He seemed to think the news would disappoint her deeply. He fixed her with a worried blue gaze and waited, scarcely breathing, until she said, “Oh, really?”

“I guess I kind of gave the impression it was mine,” he said. “But see, my brother’s off on this fishing trip, him and his wife. Left his van at our mom’s house in Nanticoke Landing. Told her to watch over it and not let nobody drive it. Me is who he meant. But he’s due back this afternoon and so yesterday I got to thinking. ‘Well, durn,’ I got to thinking. ‘Here’s this fully equipped RV, been setting in Mom’s yard all week and I have not so much as tried that little microwave.’ So last night I stayed in it, and this morning I took it out to make my estimates. Mom said she don’t even want to know about it. Said not to drag her into it. But what can he do to me, right? What’s he going to do to me-haul me off to jail?”

“Maybe he won’t find out,” Delia said.

“Oh, he’ll find out, all right. Be just like him to have wrote down the mileage before he left,” Vernon told her gloomily.

“You could always say you thought the battery needed charging.”

“ Battery. Sure.”

“Does he live here? In the van, I mean?”

“Naw.”

“Well, I would,” Delia said. She bent to raise the seat of an upholstered bench. Just as she had expected, there was storage space underneath. She glimpsed woolens of some kind-blankets or jackets. “I would make it my year-round home,” she said. “Really! Who needs a big old house and all those extra rooms?”

“Yeah, but my brother’s got three kids,” Vernon said.

“Have you ever seen those under-cabinet coffeemakers?” Delia asked him.

“Huh?”

She was inspecting the kitchen area now. It was a model of miniaturization, with a sink the size of a salad bowl and a two-burner stovetop. A dented metal percolator stood on one of the burners. “They have these coffeepots,” she told Vernon, “that you permanently install beneath the overhang of a cabinet. So you don’t waste any space.”

“Is that a fact.”

“Actually, there’s a whole line of under-cabinet equipment. Toaster ovens, can openers… electric can opener you install beneath the-”

“I believe my brother just uses the hand-cranked kind,” Vernon said.

“Well, if this were mine, I’d have everything under-cabinet.”

“Hand-cranked don’t take no space at all, to speak of.”

“I’d have nothing rattling around,” Delia said, “nothing interfering, so at a moment’s notice I could hop behind the wheel and go. Travel with my house on my back, like a snail. Stop when I got tired. Park in whatever campground caught my fancy.”

“Well, but campgrounds,” Vernon said. “Mostly you’d need to reserve ahead, for a campground.”

“And next morning I’d say, ‘Okay! That’s it for this place!’ And move on.”

“The rates are kind of steep too, if the campground’s halfway decent,” Vernon said. “Durn. Is that the time?”

He was looking at the clock above the sink. Delia was glad to see that the clock, at least, was attached to the wall. In her opinion, there was far too much loose and adrift here-not just the percolator but sloppily refolded newspapers and videotapes out of their boxes and cast-off pieces of clothing. “What I can’t fathom,” she said, “is how you manage to drive with these things sliding all over. Wouldn’t you have flying objects every time you hit a speed bump?”

“Not as I’ve noticed,” Vernon said. “But remember this ain’t my property. And speaking of which, my brother’s due back in like a couple of hours so I reckon I better be going.”

“I wish I could come too,” Delia said.

“Yeah. Right. Well, look, it’s been great talking with you-”

“Maybe I could just ride along for a little tiny part of the way,” Delia said.

“When-now?”

“Just to see how it handles on the road.”

“Well, it… handles fine on the road,” Vernon said. “But I’m going inland, you know? I’m nowhere near any beaches. Going down Three eighty past Ashford, way past Ashford, over to-”

“I’ll just ride to, um, Ashford,” Delia said.

She knew she was making him nervous. He stood staring at her, his eyebrows crinkled and his mouth slightly open, his clipboard dangling forgotten from one hand. Never mind: any moment now she would let him off the hook. She would give a little coming-to-her-senses laugh and tell him that on second thought, she couldn’t possibly ride to Ashford. She did have a family after all, and already they must be wondering where she was.

And yet here stood this van, this beautiful, completely stocked, entirely self-sufficient van that you could travel in forever, unentangled with anyone else. Oh, couldn’t she offer to buy it? How much did such things cost? Or steal it, even-shove Vernon out the door and zoom off, careening west on little back roads where no one could ever track her.

But: “Well,” she said regretfully, “I do have a family.”

“Family in Ashford? Oh, in that case,” Vernon said.

It took her a minute to understand. His eyebrows smoothed themselves out, and he leaned past her to slide the door shut. Then he flung his clipboard on the bench and said, “Long as you’ve got transportation back, then…”

Speechless, Delia made her way to the front. She sat in the passenger seat and perched her tote bag on her knees. Next to her, Vernon was settling behind the wheel. When he switched on the ignition, the van roared to life so suddenly that she fancied it had been jittering with impatience all this time.