“It’s so beautiful,” she said, and he wondered if she really meant it, if it touched her with even a fraction of the intensity it touched him, or if she was saying what she thought he wanted to hear. He looked up at the clouds streaming over them.

Lightning touched the plain a mile away, the blast of thunder vibrating the ground beneath their feet.

Melanie clutched his arm.

“Should we go back to the car?” she asked, and he couldn’t help but feel a little betrayed. You embraced a storm by standing in the middle of the goddamn thing, feeling the rain beat down on your face, letting the wind bully you, trying not to flinch when the thunder dropped right on top of your head.

“Sure,” he said. “We can go back.”

They experienced the storm from inside the RV, everything reduced to gray through the rain-streaked glass and nothing to see beyond fifty yards as thunder detonated all around them, the Winnebago creaking and listing against the stronger gusts.

Melanie reached over and pried Peter’s right hand off the steering wheel and laced her fingers through his. Her hand was small and warm, and he was afraid if he looked at her she would kiss him.

When the storms had passed, they went on, taking backroads into Kansas, the late afternoon sky going bright and clear, Peter feeling with every passing breath like the RV was shrinking, the air being compressed from his lungs.

Thirty miles north of Hoxie, he pulled off onto the side of the road.

“Why are you stopping?” Melanie asked.

“I just need some air.”

He walked around the front of the Winnebago, the overworked engine pumping eddies of heat through the radiator. Twenty yards from the road, he stopped. The only disruption in all that prairie a grain mill several miles to the east. Peter took deep breaths until the mayhem in his head had gone quiet and he could hear the grasses scraping at his jeans.

Melanie said, “You all right, Peter?”

The sun had dipped below the western horizon.

“Yeah. You?”

“Uh huh.”

They traveled in silence for another mile.

“I mean, did I do something? Because I thought we were having a pretty good time this morning, but now—”

“No, of course not.”

“We weren’t having a good time?”

“No, I mean you didn’t do anything.”

She stared out her window.

They cruised south on Highway 23, and the quiet had grown cancerous by the time the headlights of the RV swept across the porch of Melanie’s farmhouse. He shifted into park and turned back the ignition. Melanie unbuckled her seatbelt.

“Hold on,” Peter said.

“What?”

He wanted her out of the RV. Wanted nothing more than to drive back to the motel, crawl into bed.

“This is my fault,” he said.

“What are you talking about?”

“It was my idea. I invited you.”

“Yeah, you did.”

“I thought…”

“What?”

“I shouldn’t have asked you to come.”

Melanie put her hand on the door.

“It’s not your fault,” he said, reaching across the open space between the seats, almost touching her, letting his hand rest instead on the edge of her seat. “I just thought I was capable of doing this.”

“Of doing what? Being with me? Is it so difficult?”

“Being with anyone is, but when I saw you in the café last night…I don’t know…something shifted. I’ve said more to you in the last couple days than I have to anyone in twenty years.”

“That’s supposed to make me feel better?”

“If you understood, if you could be in my head for two minutes, it would.”

The interior lights cut out.

Peter said, “This morning, you asked me where I lived, and I told you I was from Providence.”

“So?”

“That wasn’t really the truth. I lived there a long time ago, but I don’t really live anywhere now. I bought this RV in 1987. Been my home ever since.” Out Peter’s window, a lightning bug flared against the glass. “It’s the hardest thing right now for me not to ask you to get out.”

Melanie opened her door.

“I’m not saying I want you to.”

“I need some air.”

She climbed out of the Winnebago and walked across the gravel drive, easing down on the front porch steps. Peter looked at the keys dangling from the ignition. He touched them. Opened his door and stepped down into the grass.

Lightning bugs everywhere.

A lone cricket screeching maniacally.

He sat beside her on the steps. Cool and he could smell warm hay carried on the breeze.

Said, “In the winters, I seek out ice storms and blizzards. Tornadoes and hurricanes in the summertime. I was in Charleston when Hugo roared ashore in ’89. I was in Florida for Andrew in ’92. The Lower Ninth Ward last summer when the levies broke. I’ve spent winters at Paradise Lodge on the south slope of Rainier just to watch it dump nine hundred inches of snow. A couple years ago I stayed a month at the observatory on Mount Washington. Stood in a hundred and forty mile-per-hour wind that almost blew me off the mountain. I feel…dead…all the time, except when I’m in the middle of some storm, watching the clouds swirl, feeling the snow or rain pelt my face. It doesn’t make sense, I know, but this is what I do, and I’ve been doing it for twenty years, and I came to Hoxie to do it, and then I met you, and for a minute—I don’t know why—I wanted to share it with you.”

“Do you have family, Peter?”

The question caused him to flinch. “I don’t have anyone. Look, I’m sorry. I’ve got nothing to offer you. I know that. I just want you to understand that it’s not your fault. Has nothing to do with you. The reason it turned out like it did today is ’cause I—”

“You have issues.”

“Yeah.”

“A lot of them.”

“Now why are you crying?”

“’Cause you hurt my feelings, dummy.” She wiped her face, got up, and hurried into the house, the door slamming after her. He could hear her crying through the thin walls.

Pushed himself onto his feet and climbed the two flimsy steps to the stoop, where he pulled open the screened door and knocked on the wood of the inner door.

“Melanie, come on. Can we talk please?”

The cries more distant now, lost inside the house.

“I’m coming in, all right?” He tried the door. The knob turned, hinges creaking as he let it swing open. “Melanie?”

He stepped into a foyer, the air redolent of cardboard.

There were boxes everywhere—stacked to the ceiling on either side of the hallway that ran past the stairs into the kitchen, leaving the walkway so tight he would’ve had to sidestep to pass through. At first, he thought Melanie must be in the process of moving, wondered why she hadn’t mentioned it before, but then his eyes fell on the living room.

He’d never seen anything like it.

Four television sets, three DVD players, what probably would have formed a cubic yard of DVDs had they not been spread across the room.

A leather couch buried beneath stacks of National Geographic and The New Yorker.

A coffee table caved in under the weight of several full sets of encyclopedias.

Out from under the couch, a gray cat darted over a pile of clothes that still bore their price tags, disappearing into a dining room paralyzed for the stacks of newspapers, eight grills, still in their boxes, and what he estimated to be over five hundred unopened packages of plastic utensils monopolizing every square inch of table space.

He made his way through the cramped hall, and as he neared the kitchen the smell of rotting food became overpowering. He held the side of his arm across his nose and mouth, and standing in the doorway, wondered how Melanie even made use of the Fridge and the sink and the oven range what with the linoleum buried under hundreds of pounds of canned food and sacks of flour and sugar, thirty cereal boxes, and on the countertops, a component of the stench—clusters of bananas and apples and what might have been oranges, all shriveled and glazed with blue mold.