I blinked at him for a moment. Was there such a spring? After what happened to me, I was ready to believe it. What would it be like to turn into a mermaid? Would you be able to turn back if you didn’t like being fishy?

Wait. Wait. Wait. Did I want to turn back into a guy? Into that guy that I was. Well, not right at the moment. Please God, no. I shook my head and made a chicken noise.

Rollie watched me, still grinning. “I wanna see where you’re going with this,” he said.

I tried again. “Yesterday I was a man,” I said. “Guy Wendell. The suitcase is his.”

“What happened to him?” Rollie asked.

“He turned into me.”

Rollie drove.

“I approve,” he said, and reached over and tweaked my nipple.

I almost hit my head on the roof of the cab. I made a sound I didn’t intend to make, and I felt my face go hot.

He laughed like a loon while I gasped for breath to speak.

“Don't do that while you're driving,” I managed. Because I can’t get you back, I didn’t say.

“Fair,” he said, hand back on the wheel, still grinning at the highway ahead.

I tried to tell him a third time. He believed something had happened to me. That was his version of a philosophical position. “If you believe it, I’ll believe you,” he said.

He sucked at his teeth, probably getting a crumb of bacon out of his gums. “My cousin Dwayne went fishing in Lake Okeechobee and came back speaking Cajun French, having never been to Louisiana in his life.” He shrugged one shoulder. “Florida,” he said.

“Florida,” I agreed.

The highway went by. The cab was warm and smelled right, and the radio played something country at low volume, and I sat with several feelings at once, none of which I had a long history with. I looked sideways at Rollie, then I sat sideways in the seat so I didn’t have to turn my head, and we drove through the towns south of Clearwater, while I looked at him all I wanted.

* * *

We dropped the load at a depot that smelled of machine oil and cardboard, and Rollie went inside with the paperwork and came out with a bill of lading for a pickup in Tampa, bound for Charlotte, North Carolina. He got back in the cab and put his hand out, and I put mine in it. My hand still looked small in his. I was still getting used to being small.

“Say I do believe you,” he said. “Just suppose you used to be this guy -- he nodded at the suitcase behind us -- but now you're not. You’re not this Guy-guy anymore.”

He shook his head.

Guy-guy, I thought and smiled at him.

“Dayem,” he said. “I think you hit the jackpot. Young, beautiful, and good in the sack. What more do you want?”

I felt pleased. I noticed I felt pleased. I considered whether I should and decided that this was Florida, and the springs had their own opinions, and mine at this particular moment was that yes, jackpot seemed about right. Guy cashed in his chips, and I won the jackpot.

* * *

We picked up the Tampa load -- industrial machinery in big crates -- and got back on the highway heading north. The afternoon light came in long and amber through the windshield and Rollie had the radio on low.

“Where you from originally?” he asked.

“Milwaukee,” I said. “I was born there. But I got married on an island -- I'm trying to remember the name of it. She's from there, my ex. Took the kids back when we split. Went back home….” I still couldn’t think of the name of the island.

“Ouch,” he said. “You don't look old enough to have been married and had kids.”

“I'm thirty-eight,” I said. It sounded completely implausible.

He looked at me. “You might be twenty-eight,” he said. “But I ain't believing anything over -- oh.” He grinned. “Nineteen. Tell me you're nineteen and I'll believe you.”

I looked at my hands on my knees. The hands of someone who had never closed an earthmover deal in her life.

“I have three kids,” I said.

“Uh-huh. That’s what made your tits so big. But they never chewed your nipples.”

“And I coached Little League. For my boys.”

“Sure.”

“I've sold earth movers in seven states.”

“Earthmovers,” he repeated. He looked at the road. Looked back at me. The grin was getting wider.

“You,” he said. “Sold earthmovers. Well, I know you done moved the earth with me.”

“I was six feet tall, I said,” with what dignity I had. “I had a very good handshake.”

Rollie laughed so hard he had to ease off the accelerator, and it was infectious, it filled the cab, and I started laughing too and couldn't stop -- laughing at seventy miles an hour on a Florida highway with Guy Wendell's suitcase in the back and the Braves cap on my head.

It felt like something loosened and fell away.

* * *

Somewhere north of Tampa I remembered the rental car.

“Oh,” I said.

“What.”

I fumbled in the billfold and found the rental agreement folded in an inside pocket and held it up. “Can't look now,” Rollie said. “Driving.”

“The car is still at the motel,” I said.

“What car?”

“The big ol’ Buick I rented after flying down here.”

“Oh, that car,” said Rollie, grinning at the road.

I looked at the paper. Guy Wendell typed in every box. Rockford, Illinois. The long number was company account. Everything documented and real -- printed evidence of a person who had walked into a Florida motel and vanished.

“They're going to come looking for it,” I said. “For him.”

“For who?”

“That Guy-guy,” I said and giggled.

“But not this guy,” he said, reaching over to squeeze my thigh.

I opened the billfold and found the driver's license. Six feet, one-sixty, the duck-butt, the broad jaw. The face of someone I used to know very well. I held it at arm's length.

“Don't look much like you anymore,” Rollie observed with a glance.

“No,” I said.

A sign went past the window. Silver Springs, fourteen miles.

I had some vague idea about looking for the Buick when we passed through. The rental agreement was right there. It would be the responsible thing. Walt would need to be called, arrangements made, Guy Wendell's life dealt with in some orderly fashion.

Silver Springs came and went.

The Buick sat in the parking lot in my mind, baking in the afternoon sun, and I watched the sign slide past and didn't say anything and the highway continued north and the light was amber and Rollie's hand was warm on my thigh again.

The island where I'd met Laneka -- I still couldn't bring up its name. When I reached for it, I got the shape of the place instead: palms against a particular blue, the sound of surf, a woman on a beach turning to look at me with her hand shading her eyes. The children I couldn't picture specifically, but felt as a warmth, a weight, a gravity that was still there even if the details were softening at the edges.

Guy Wendell, I thought, experimentally.

It felt like a story someone had told me once. A good story. Mostly true.

Charlotte was seven hundred miles up the road and the industrial machinery shifted in its crates on the curves and Rollie drummed his thumb on the steering wheel to whatever was on the radio and outside the window, Florida gave way to Georgia, slow and green.

Gwen, I thought.

That fit. But not Gwen Wendell. That still sounded stupid. Maybe Gwen Blankenship?

I leaned back in the seat and watched the highway and put my hand on top of Rollie Blankenship's hand there on my thigh and felt, without qualification and without examining it too carefully, like I was going in the right direction.