Drives Like a Dream by Porter Shreve

the desert for a while.
    "So, how is the ersatz Buddhist?" Davy leaned against the railing outside the church door.
    "I wouldn't know." Jessica sighed.
    "You don't hear from him?"
    "Every once in a while. Sometimes the dog will look out the window wondering where his daddy is. I think Bedlam wants him back more than I do," she said, though part of her wished that Blane had joined her here today, with his amulets and ponytail. That would give the old folks something to talk about—Blane gazing soulfully into their eyes.
    As the widowers arrived at the door, Ivan asked if they'd like an escort.
    "Ah, we'll have our escort soon enough," one of them replied and the others laughed.
    "Jesus," Jessica said as the widowers went inside. She turned to Davy. "So, what time is it getting to be? I guess we should go in, too."
    He checked his watch. "We've got a few minutes."
    "What's going on with you? You've been quiet since yesterday."
    "You don't want to know," he said. "Talk about the brink of death. We thought we had a big investor at work, but he just bailed on us. What can I say? We're barely hanging on." After finishing college in Ann Arbor two years ago, Davy had moved to Chicago to work for an old housemate, Sanjay Patel. The company, Lowball.com , was a regional variation of
Consumer Reports
that relied on a subscription service. At this point, Davy explained, Lowball could collapse or be bought at any moment. Sanjay said that if a buyer turned up, the investors would make a nice windfall, but if the venture tanked, much more than their months of nonstop work would be sacrificed. When the business had just started, Davy persuaded his girlfriend, Teresa, to invest in the company half of the eighty thousand dollars she'd inherited from her mother's estate.
    "Now," Davy said, "not a day goes by when I'm not thinking of some way to give it back." In two whirlwind years the startup had become their entire lives, the bond that could strangle them or hold them together for good.
    No wonder Teresa had stayed in Chicago this weekend, Jessica thought. Davy claimed that her allergies were acting up, but she probably just needed a break from the drama.
    "So what about you?" he asked. "I hear you've found a new, edgier Blane."
    "Yeah," Ivan added. "Mom's nervous about this one, Jess. He's some kind of anarchist, right?"
    Ivan's blind support of their mother's every opinion irritated her. "Mom thinks he's an anarchist. He's just wiry and a little mean-looking, that's all." Jessica smoothed the sleeve of her suit jacket. "Do you really think Lady Bird Johnson would be dating an anarchist?"
    "Lady Bird Johnson?"
    "My suit. It's mint green. It's very, I don't know, First Lady-ish." She was about to say that she wasn't dating an anarchist at all, that she was only casually seeing an androgynously handsome melancholic who had come into the store one day to buy tofu and ginger candies. He had returned wearing revolutionist T-shirts: one with Che Guevara holding a machine gun, another with a Nike swoosh that looked like a dagger dripping blood. She told her mother that she'd met an anarchist, and Lydia grew alarmed. Later, when Jessica started seeing him—"Void," he called himself—he turned out to be a pussycat. But she hadn't bothered to clarify this with her mother, having recently made a pact with herself to keep some semblance of a private life.
    "So your boyfriend doesn't trust the government?" Ivan pressed.
    "Did I say that?" She didn't need to get into this, and she certainly wasn't going to debate politics with Ivan in the middle of her father's wedding. He had always been a quivering Jell-O of sentimentality when it came to baseball, apple pie, Chevrolet, and the U.S. government. Like their grandfather, Ivan's hero and paragon who had been a car designer at GM, Jessica's older brother had no time for people who held what he considered to be extreme beliefs.
    "I don't know if it's healthy to choose men according to how much Mom