"I've been doing it wrong for thirty-two years," he said.
"You overthink it. You're too careful. You go in like you're handling a baby. You have to go in like you don't care if it breaks."
"That's what Carmela says about Peter. She says I play him too careful."
"Press play," said Theda, and took another bite.
Cosmo came in for the hitchhiking, as promised. He came in when they called him, at a run, wiping his hands on his pants, and stood behind the couch with his arms folded and watched Clark Gable demonstrate, with enormous confidence, the many scientific uses of the thumb, while car after car went roaring by without stopping. Then Colbert stepped up to the side of the road, hitched up her skirt, and showed a stretch of stocking and a garter, and the first car that came along slammed on its brakes so hard it nearly went into the ditch. Cosmo slapped the back of the couch and laughed until he had to take off his glasses and wipe them, and kept saying, "Oh, she's got him! She's got him! Fifty-one years, still gets me!" When he went back to the radios, they could hear him out in the hall, still laughing, telling Barney on the radio about it whether Barney wanted to know or not.
They did not talk much after that. It got later, and the rain had settled into a steady hiss on the long sawtooth roof of the garage, and the fluorescent tubes buzzed, and outside in the dark the buses came in from their last runs one after another with a long sigh of air brakes and the clang of the big doors. Theda's feet had dried. At some point she had stopped sitting at the very end of the couch, and so had Nicky, and they had both put an arm along the top of the Walls of Jericho, not touching, his hand a few inches from hers on the gray wool.
There was a scene near the end, at another auto camp, at night. Ellie and Peter were in their beds on either side of the blanket, in the dark, and Ellie asked him whether he had ever been in love. And Peter, lying on his back with his arm under his head and his face turned up to the ceiling, began to talk. He did not talk about a girl. He talked about an island in the Pacific he had seen once, where the water and the sky came together at night and you could not tell where one ended and the other began, and about how, if he ever found a girl who was hungry for that kind of thing, he would take her there, and they would swim out into that water together, and that was the girl he wanted. And it was strange, because all through the picture Gable had been loud and quick and rude and very funny, and now he was talking very quietly, almost to himself, the way you talk about something you've decided you'll never actually get.
Theda glanced over at Nicky. He was not looking at the screen. He was looking down at his own hand on the blanket, and his face was very still, and his mouth was moving very slightly with the words.
"You know this one," she whispered.
"It's the one I can't get right," he said, without looking up. "Carmela makes me do it over and over. Every night. She says I do it like I'm reading the specials at a restaurant." He was quiet a moment. "I guess I never wanted anything like that bad enough to say it out loud."
She didn't answer. On the screen, Ellie came around the end of the blanket in the dark and knelt down beside Peter's bed and told him she loved him, and he sent her back to her own side.
"Oh, you idiot," said Theda, to the screen, or not to the screen.
The tape ate itself four minutes later.
It made a sound first, a low unhappy grinding from somewhere deep in the guts of the top-loader, and the picture on the Zenith shivered and then began to crawl, the faces stretching sideways and then breaking up into long silver bands, and Gable's voice slowed and dropped into a groaning bass like a record on the wrong speed. Nicky lunged for the machine and hit stop, and then eject, and the lid rose up with its heavy clunk, and the cassette rose with it, and out of the bottom of the cassette, like the tongue of a strangled cow, hung a long, crumpled, glistening loop of brown tape.