``And I'll take you with me.'' The two of them against the world. That had been how she imagined it. For when he began to talk and dream all at the same time, making his plans as he went, she had begun dreaming too. But now the dream was over. The big waking up had happened.

``What did I imagine?'' she thought. ``Did I see him about to swing low in a chariot? Or maybe poling up the south fork of the Forked Deer River braving the wastes dumped in it? Maybe I saw him on a barge with a gang of Ethiopians poling it.''

And I'll take you with me. He had taken her all right. Wednesday nights after youth fellowship. Out of the church and into his big car, it tooling over the road with him driving and the headlights sweeping the pike ahead and after he hit college, his expansiveness, the quaint little pine board tourist courts, cabins really, with a cute naked light bulb in the ceiling (unfrosted and naked as a streetlight, like the one on the corner where you used to play when you were a kid, where you watched the bats swooping in after the bugs, watching in between your bouts at hopscotch), a room complete with moths pinging the light and the few casual cockroaches cruising the walls, an insect Highway Patrol with feelers waving. And the bed that sagged in a certain place where all the weight had been put too many times before and the walls fine and thin for overhearing talk in the next room when Gratt went out for ice, the sound coming through the walls like something on the other side of the curtain, so you knew they heard you when they were quiet and while you lay wondering what they had heard you listened.