When I saw my Aunt Tippy at the top of the library ladder I thought she was just taking a nap. I didn’t know she was dead. One time I found Tippy asleep on the step-stool in the pantry. Another time she was dead to the world on the bathroom floor. So when I found Tippy sitting on one of the ladder’s top steps with her eyes closed and her head leaning to the side, just like the Morning People on the subway, it didn’t seem so strange to me. All I thought was how neat it was that Tippy’s neck and the scarf she had tied around it were the same color as the periwinkle crayon in my box of sixty-four.

     Tippy looked tired. Her mouth was open a little and her tongue was hanging to the side like our mutt Rebel’s does when he’s worn-out from playing catch with me and my brother, Hoppy. I thought the ladder was a pretty weird place to take a nap, but I’m ten and I still don’t know too much about grownups anyway besides what I hear when I sit on the stairs during one of Mom and Dad’s cocktail parties or when I go to Mom’s office in the basement and listen outside the door when she’s helping one of her patients with a problem.

     I’m not supposed to listen when Mom’s in there with one of her Office People. That’s what I call Mom’s patients. Mom says I called them that ever since I was little. Dad works at a bank across the bridge in the city and he calls the Office People head cases. I made a note in my book to ask him about that later.

     Tippy being dead kinda makes sense now. No wonder my dad yelled “What the hell are you doing?” when he came in to Tippy’s library and saw me sitting there reading, like always. Dad made the same face then that he did the time one of my experiments went wrong and I burned my eyebrows by accident. Dad looked mad and worried and surprised all at the same time. I remember because he swore that time, too, and he usually only swears when he thinks I’m not listening or doesn’t know I’m around.

     I learned a few new words that day. I remember because I keep a list of words in my notebook. Not this one. The one I write all my findings and observings and stuff I don’t really understand yet in. Mom wants me to write everything about when I found Tippy in this new notebook. And she said her friend Dr. Medavoy could help me, too, when I’m done writing everything down. To help me figure things out, like a puzzle. We do puzzles a lot, me and Tippy. All kinds. She even makes up her own with special rules to follow and pictures she draws herself.

     Tippy really likes her rules, even if maybe not everybody else does. That’s why it’s so weird that Tippy was breaking her own rules and messing with the books on the top shelf when she died. There are seven shelves in Tippy’s bookcases and it was Saturday, and the rule is you worked on the bottom shelves on Saturday and if Tippy was breaking her own rules she had to have a good reason. I just have to find out what it is. I like rules too. That way everybody’s treated the same. And it‘s Tippy’s house anyhow.

     Granma Blanche and Tippy are sisters and they live next door to each other on Glenwood Road in Brooklyn. Dad said that a long time ago both houses belonged to Granma Blanche and Tippy’s mom and dad. My dad called them Nana and Papa. When they died, one house went to Tippy and one to Granma Blanche. That happened before I was born. I didn’t know Nana and Papa, but they must have been pretty nice people to give away a couple of houses. But Dad said they gave Tippy a house because no man would have Tippy and her strange ways, and the family wanted to make sure Tippy wouldn’t wind up on the dole. I asked Dad what that was and he said it’s when you get something for nothing, like charity. When I said isn’t that what giving Tippy the house was like anyway, Dad told me it was grownup business and to go read a book.

     I like reading. It’s a good thing, too, because people are always telling me to go read a book. And I like going to Tippy’s big, quiet house that’s full of books. The stoop has just the right number of steps, 7, there’s a chair in the library that faces the right way, and Tippy lets me read any of her books as long as I follow the rules. She has rules about her books and dirt and stuff. Once Tippy nearly took Granpa’s head off when he forgot to shake the doormat into the garden, after he wiped his feet and before coming into the foyer, where you’re supposed to wipe your feet again before coming into the parlor.

     She uses words like foyer and parlor, Tippy does. In my house Mom and Dad call them the hall and the living room. I remember Dad saying once that having money changed rooms quicker than a new coat of paint, and then he said something about putting on airs. Dad didn’t know I was listening from the third step and when I asked him if Tippy used the airs to dry the paint, I wound up finishing the last three chapters of Huckleberry Finn.

     It sounds so stupid now, that I didn’t know Tippy was dead. Everybody says I’m such a smart kid, just like Tippy was when she was my age. She’s always telling Granma Blanche  “William may have the muscles, but Katharine has the brains, but she should spend more time with me to smooth those rough edges.”

     William is Hoppy’s real name. We call him “Hoppy” because my mom says he hopped before he walked. She says he sat on his bottom and used one arm to bump along the floor. I wasn’t there, because Hoppy is eight years older than me, so I’ll have to take their words for it, but I’ve seen pictures, so I guess it’s true. Granma’s older than Tippy and started calling her that because Tippy used to stand on her toes all the time.

     I’m Katharine, the one that Tippy wants to take the sandpaper to. Everybody calls me Kat. Unless they’re mad or I messed up an experiment again. Then they call me Katharine Celeste. The kids in my new class at school tried calling me “Kitty” because I’m the youngest kid in the class and a kitten is a baby cat. I told them I like Kat better, because it has three letters. They said that was stupid and I told them that if I was stupid they were too, because Mom and Dad said I was gonna be in a class with kids like me this year. Older kids and some that skipped a grade like me, too. Jeez I hope they don’t try calling me Skippy next. Just wait till they hear about this. That I didn’t know Tippy was dead. Like I need another reason to be treated different.

     Tippy always called me Katharine so I figure that means she’s only halfway mad at me all the time. Probably because my edges aren’t right. And Tippy likes her edges to be right. One time Hoppy borrowed a book and put it back and didn’t make sure it was lined up with the marks Tippy has on the shelves that the books have to touch so they’ll all be straight and he had to promise like a million times it wouldn’t happen again before she’d let him borrow another book.

     Mom says Tippy being dead is an accident. She says that Tippy’s favorite scarf got caught in between the rail and the top wheels of the ladder when she was reaching for a book on the top shelf, and when Tippy slipped the knot got so tight around her neck she couldn’t breathe. I’m glad that at least she was wearing her favorite scarf when it happened, but what I can’t figure out is what Tippy was doing on the top of the ladder in the first place. Whenever I have a problem with a puzzle Tippy always says, “Katharine, find your beginning and start there.”

     Before I found Tippy, me, Mom, Dad, and my big brother, Hoppy, were visiting Granma Blanche and Granpa Stuart to celebrate Hoppy’s football scholarship to college. I guess he also won a free trip somewhere, too, because everybody kept saying the scholarship was Hoppy’s ticket out of Vietnam. I’ll have to check my regular notebook about that. I thought he was going to Ohio.

     I was bored out of my skull at Granma and Granpa’s house, so I went out the front door and down the right side of the front steps, like I always do, and I didn’t touch the front lawn because Granpa has rules, too. And I was really careful not to step more than three times in one sidewalk square on the way over to Tippy’s. That’s one of my rules.

On Tippy’s porch I took the key out from under the third flowerpot, the one with the red flowers. There are always red flowers. Geraniums or those funny-sounding Christmas flowers I can never remember how to spell. Point-somethings. I’ll have to make a note to check on that.

     I opened the front door and put the key back under the pot and made sure that I didn’t spill any of the dirt on the brick steps. Then I wiped my feet, shook out the mat, put the mat back, wiped my feet again and pushed the big wood and glass door open into the front hall.

     The library is on the right side of the house and has these big double-doors and that’s where Tippy spends most of her time, dusting her books, making sure they’re all lined up the right way. Moving them around by size or by color, depending on what day it is. The big bookcases have seven shelves and that works out real great because there’s seven days in the week so each shelf has its own day.

     Tippy didn’t answer me when I called her name, so I took off my Hush Puppies, put them together on the mat, facing out towards the street like Tippy says. Then I went into the library and saw why Tippy didn’t answer me. She was kind of sitting on the book ladder. I thought she got tired of pushing the ladder around the room because it’s made of wood and pretty heavy, even with the wheels on the bottom that roll on the floor and the ones at the top that move on the rail around the room. The bookshelves go from the floor to the ceiling. I figured Aunt Tippy decided to sit awhile and fell asleep.

     But now that I think about it I don’t think that Tippy’s feet were really touching the ladder’s steps. Her left foot kinda pointed down and the right one was kinda bent back like it got caught or something.

     I didn’t know she was dead so I got three pillows and piled them up so I could put my feet on them like I always do and sat down in my favorite chair. It’s the one I always sit in when I go over to visit Tippy and her books, the chair that’s exactly three feet back from the middle of the big window that faces Glenwood Road. Tippy says she wants me to read To Kill a Mockingbird because I remind her of Scout and since I keep hearing people say how much I’m like Tippy, I guess Tippy was like Scout, too, when she was a kid. So that’s where I was and what I was doing when Dad came in looking for me and Tippy.

     I heard Dad calling my name as soon as he came into Tippy’s house because the ceiling in the foyer is two floors high and it has a really neat echo. I was gonna holler back but Granma Blanche is always telling me that young ladies don’t raise their voices. I guess she didn’t see those ladies on TV setting fire to their underwear. I heard Dad’s friends at the last party call the ladies Women’s Libbers. I didn’t yell back when Dad came in to Tippy’s house, but not because I was trying to be a young lady but because I didn’t want to wake up Tippy because I didn’t know she was dead.

     I put my pointer finger on my lips to tell him to be quiet, but I guess Dad figured out what was wrong with Tippy pretty quick because the next thing I know he’s making the Experiment Face I wrote about before and acting like Fred Flintstone. Dad threw me over his shoulder and ran out of Tippy’s house. We were going so fast that Dad even forgot Granpa’s rule about keeping off the grass and I was bouncing up and down like crazy trying to hold on to Tippy’s book.

     I yelled “Daddy, we have to go back! Aunt Tippy doesn’t let her books outta the house! And she’s gonna be mad to begin with because you didn’t take off your shoes. And what about my shoes? They’re still on the mat. Tippy doesn’t like it when there are extra shoes in the house!”

     Daddy said, “It doesn’t matter what Tippy wants anymore. She’s dead.”

     When me and Dad got back to Granma and Granpa’s house and Dad told everybody what happened Granpa and Hoppy went over to Tippy’s and I went to Granpa Stuart’s study to lay on the rug and write stuff in my regular notebook like I always do. Dad, Mom, and Granma Blanche came in and started talking about me like I wasn’t there. I like when grownups do that.

     Mom was mad at Dad about something. Maybe because Dad was behind Granpa’s bar drinking right out of the bottle. The rule is you always use a glass. Granma Blanche must have been mad too because she used all three of Dad’s names when she talked to him. “Spencer Tracy Cassidy!” she said. And then Dad said something about not lying to me, that I was too smart, and then Mom said something like it doesn’t matter what my IQ is or that I skipped a grade or two because I’m still a ten year-old little girl who found her aunt hanging in a place she always felt safe in.

     Mom was talking in her Office Voice. It’s the voice she uses when she answers the black phone on her desk in her office. The phone that has buttons in rows of threes on it. I like that phone. But I don’t think Dad liked it much because he swore again and said something about shrink crap, the sewer, and me not even knowing Tippy was dead when I found her. Maybe Dad said something else after that but I’m not sure because I was busy straightening the tassel things on Granma Blanche’s rug because they were all crooked and when I looked up Mom, Dad, and Granma Blanche were all staring at me.

     Later me and Mom were in Granma’s kitchen eating Lorna Doones and milk and that’s when Mom told me what she thinks happened to Tippy.

     “It was an accident,” she said. Mom held my hands so tight and her face was so close I could see where the red lipstick ran into the lines around her mouth, like it was trying to escape so it wouldn’t wind up on her teeth the way it always did.

     “It was an accident,” she said again and told me all about the scarf and the ladder and the wheels and the railing. It all came out in such a whoosh of words that I don’t think Mom breathed even once in the middle. I wasn’t really paying attention because I wanted to go back to the study and finish fixing the rug. That’s when I remembered it was Saturday.

     I asked Mom what Tippy was doing breaking her own rules and messing with the books on the top shelf on a Saturday. Mom said she didn’t know but that Tippy must have had a good reason and that like I told Mom before it was Tippy’s house and they were Tippy’s rules and we should just accept that Tippy had a good reason for doing what she did. Then Mom asked me how I was feeling and if there was anything else I’d like to talk about. I told her I just wanted to figure out what was so interesting on the top shelf that made Tippy break the rules. Mom told me to go read a book.

     I was reading about Scout and her big brother, Jem, when people I don’t know started bringing casseroles and bottles over to Granma and Granpa’s house and saying they were sorry about Tippy. I don’t think any of them did anything to Tippy so I don’t know what they were apologizing for. I asked a couple Casserole and Bottle People if they knew why Tippy was on the ladder on a Saturday. Both of them looked at me kind of the same way Dad did in the library so I figured they didn’t know why and were trying to figure it out too. I said thank you anyway and that I was gonna do one of my experiments and when I figured it out I would make sure Granma and Granpa let them know why Tippy was on the top of ladder when she had her accident. I wanted to ask someone why people kept calling it a wake when Tippy wasn’t asleep and wouldn’t be waking up ever again but before I could Mom told Hoppy it was almost time for him to take me home.

     Most of the time writing things down helps me understand stuff. Mom says that’s how a lot of her Office People figure out their problems. I know I’m smart, so I should be able to figure out this whole Tippy thing. And the thing about the wake. And why people bring casseroles over when people die. I know there’s some other stuff I don’t understand, but I’ll just write it down in my other notebook since Mom said just to write Aunt Tippy stuff in this one. That’s the rule. Tippy broke the rules and look what happened.

      When I was fixing the rug in Granpa Stuart’s study, I remember Mom told Dad she was gonna show my Tippy notebook to her friend Dr. Medavoy. Mom thinks Dr. Medavoy can help me find out why Tippy broke the rules and died, but I’m gonna find my own beginning and go over to Tippy’s house and see if I can figure it out by myself. I have to bring the Mockingbird book back, anyway. It’s still Saturday, so it’s okay. But first I have to get my notebook and then I have to find a blue scarf, just like Tippy’s.

     Just Like Tippy is a 3,256 word short story which, after being workshopped at the Yale Writers' Conference, has decided to become a mystery novella, set in 1969 Brooklyn, and whose protagonist is a 10 year-old girl who today would be considered Aspergian. In order to understand the loss of her Aunt Tippy, Kat follows the rules (and Aunt Tippy's clues) to deal with the unanswered questions about Tippy's life, her family, and her death. Appealing to anyone who likes an intriguing piece with offbeat characters and an intelligent, albeit unusual, point of view, Just Like Tippy is just the right combination of character- and plot-driven text whose storyline is anything but straight.

     Tippy's author is writer and editor, Carol Dowd-Forte, M.A., President of "A Girl's Gotta Eat: Writing and Editing for a Price" and a former stringer for The Miami Herald, who is authoring her own coming-of-middle-age tale. After a couple of decades of getting paid to write anything and everything for other people, she headed to grad school for her Master of Arts in Writing, at 49, and graduated in 2012, at 51. She’s a Mensa member, is founder of The Alley (a writers' support group), and has been an invited attendee of Yale University's Summer Writers' Conference and Workshop since its inception.

     Born in Queens, she was a tomboy when “female athlete” was considered an oxymoron, was one of the first female graduates of St. Thomas University’s Sports Administration Program (’82), and began her thirty-year trek to overnight success in television sports. She’s done a TEDx Talk (A Perimenopausal Blonde Walks Into a University... http://youtu.be/UjSr-US3l_E ), performed stand-up comedy at The Improv at the Hard Rock (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doU94Nehr_Y), swam in Jeopardy!’s contestant pool, hates the color pink, and has never ridden a school bus or eaten a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. A former coach, trainer, and marathoner, she's still an athlete, regularly exercising her inner child. Before becoming a writer, she was a fetus.

     I’m what they call a lapsed Catholic. Hyperbolically redundant, maybe, but when you’re an Irish Catholic preteen girl in mid-century New York City, and a Kelly green Dodge Sportsman van pulls up outside P.S. 66, horn honking and driver gesticulating in your direction, it’s not unusual for your first thoughts to tend towards the persecutory.

     OhmyGodJesusMaryandJosephwhatdidIdotodeservethis?

     It was 1972 P.M. (Pre-Minivan), at least a decade before Lee Iacocca developed what would become the catalyst of many a midlife crisis. My father was in the driver’s seat after picking up the green behemoth from the dealership earlier that day. We didn’t have a lot of money, my father was a lieutenant in the NYPD’s Tactical Patrol Unit and there were four of us Dowd kids, so the purchase of our first new car ever was understandably quite the event. Dad was very proud of his Irish heritage and that pride was reflected in his color selection for The Van. I, however, didn’t share in his belief that our County Sligo roots should be represented by what I thought looked like a big, rolling, ball of snot.

     As if The Van’s color wasn’t distinguishing enough, my father had thought it prudent to add our last name to the driver’s and passenger’s side doors, using those lovely gold and black stick-on letters, ubiquitous to rural neighborhood mailboxes, but not exactly common on motor vehicles in Queens. I’m still not sure why he did it. Maybe it was to make it easier to differentiate ours from all the other Kelly green Dodge Sportsman vans one found in Richmond Hill, Queens, in the early seventies, but as I stood outside my elementary school on the verge of entering junior high school and looking puberty square in the acne-prone face, I was sure it was to embarrass the hell out of me and make my life miserable.

     Much like me at that moment, The Van had no options, and my father had to reach across the passenger seat to roll down the window and call me over. Apparently, he thought I’d have trouble locating my ride home among the other sedately-hued sedans and station wagons that lined the curb. Head bowed, I made a run for it, and immediately ducked down below window level once I got in and slammed the door behind me. With no carpeting, floor mats, or interior coverage of any kind to absorb the resulting noise, my actions produced a wave of sound and self-consciousness within that steel cylinder that resonates to this day.

     Okay, maybe I’m being a little dramatic, but The Van made quite the impression. I couldn’t prove it, but for the longest time I was positive The Van was the reason I didn’t have a date until I was a senior in high school. We were the Richmond Hillbillies, sans moonshine still and rocking chair, both of which I’m sure my father would have loved to bring along on his ecto-urban excursions if he could have found the room.

     Eventually Dad “finished” the interior with lovely particle board paneling; the thin, faux wood-grained segments, screwed in place on The Van’s side and back doors, reminiscent of Mike Brady’s den. Afflicted with adult ADD, my father either lost interest in the project or couldn’t figure out how to attach said panels to the ceiling without piercing the roof and turning The Van into a colander, so that’s how the van’s interior remained: an ode to a campy 1970s sitcom.

     No amount of refinishing could alter the placement of the engine, though, which sat between the driver’s and front passenger’s seats like so much gas-powered headland. I guess the Dodge engineers had yet to figure out that whole “force versus object” thing, because any frontal collision could have sent the plastic-hooded peninsula hurtling backwards, through two bench seats and the four children occupying them. And since the use of seatbelts was mere suggestion, their buckles and straps eventually disappeared into the seats’ sticky depths.

     The Van played a major role in every Dowd vacation following its purchase, and would be part of our family until I was out of college. We traveled en masse, the six of us “making good time” as my dad would say, by rising before dawn and hitting the road with us kids in our pajamas until we reached the first roadside rest stop, where we would change and have breakfast. These stops weren’t the monuments to modernity you now find along the interstate, and often consisted of a group of weathered picnic tables decorated by the local avian contingent, an anorectic brochure rack, and an outbuilding with a few utilitarian restrooms.

     After an appetizing trip to the facilities it was time for dining van fresco. Funds were always tight and there weren’t many fast food drive-thrus in the 60s and 70s, so we carried all our food in coolers and boxes which my mom would replenish as needed. I don’t know how she did it. Two weeks, feeding six people, from a cooler on the side of the road or a camp stove in front of a tent sounds like the secular definition of Hell to me. My mother was a magician and The Van was the top hat from which she produced nightly dinner.

     Motel stays weren’t financially feasible and Google had yet to become a verb, so our sites were campsites and our vacations planned with the help of the annual Rand McNally Campground Guide. Fueled by self-preservation and flashbacks of noxious near-misses, my siblings and I quickly learned the lingo and steered our parents away from the campgrounds boasting pit toilets as an amenity or offering “environmentally-friendly” showers-- camping code for putting quarters in a slot for five minutes of hot water while standing in a cement-floored, cinder block shower stall. Dowd Family Fun at its best; a dubious tradition which had actually begun before The Van entered our lives.

     On one pre-Van summer trip to the White Mountains of New Hampshire, my father parked our battered Chevy station wagon, pitched our tent on the shores of beautiful Lake Winnipesaukee, and my mother set up her transient kitchen, cooked dinner, cleaned up, and got us kids ready to roast marshmallows. I was one of three Dowd kids, then, who were six, almost five, and three years old and not exactly adept at handling sticks attached to flaming confections, so it shouldn’t have surprised either of my parents when my brother turned around and had a smoldering compress of molten sugar affixed to his left cheek.

     A flurry of adrenaline- and fear-fueled activity ensued, culminating in my brother being dunked in the cold waters of the lake, followed by the elaborate post-panic application of just about everything that came in a Johnson and Johnson First Aid kit, circa 1965. To look at the pictures of his smiling, gauze-swathed face, you’d think my brother was practicing for a Halloween stint as a mummy, rather than recovering from a lakeside baptism due to marshmallow-related fire.

     My mother was seven months pregnant at the time. In a tent, in the woods, with three kids under the age of six and a husband who, despite his Brooklyn roots, yearned to be the original Urban Cowboy; with a dash of Jack Kerouac, a soupcon of Jacques Cousteau, and a touch of The Great Santini thrown in for good measure.

     Consistent with my father’s Mitty-esque fantasies, The Van sailed the Bay of Fundy from Maine to Nova Scotia aboard a ferry called The Bluenose, a trip forever ingrained in my memory as my first time using a travel sickness bag. As if eight hours bobbing like a titanic cork on rough northern Atlantic waters weren’t bad enough, the experience was exacerbated by a breakfast of fried eggs and tomato juice. I just wish my mother had told me to open the bag before using it. After getting a handful of breakfast I decided to just cut out the middle man and hung my head over the rail for the rest of the trip.

     On the opposite end of both the geographic and the meteorological spectrums, The Van traversed the country to The Badlands, The Black Hills, and Mount Rushmore, in South Dakota. This we did in August. On vinyl seats. Without air conditioning, and with two parents who smoked, in the back of a van with side windows that only pushed out at the bottom to form slender acute triangles of ventilation, perfect for a dog to stick its snout through, but problematic for human children at risk of suffocation and secondhand smoke.

     I saw most of Custer State Park’s buffalo, bison, and wild donkeys from a horizontal perspective, stuck to one of The Van’s bench seats in the fetal position, after developing a kidney infection that wouldn’t find relief until my parents finally took me to a clinic in the Wisconsin Dells, about 600 miles away. It was a week before the vinyl seat’s cross-hatch pattern finally faded from my pale, sweaty, gasping face. Add the heat from the omnipresent engine and an AM radio augmented with a CB (pervasive in the pre-cell phone era of The Convoy) and I think I’ve found the impetus behind my PTSD and the reason I avoid saunas and eschew trendy technology.

     By then we’d moved-up from the tent and were pulling a Coleman pop-up camper and sometimes had a rowboat perched on The Van’s roof. On our way out west, my father had a momentary lapse and forgot the financial ramifications of fast food, so we pulled into a Bob’s Big Boy somewhere in Iowa. Unfortunately, he also forgot about the boat.

The banshee-like sound of its fiberglass hull making contact with the large pendant light fixture which hung from the drive-in’s cantilevered roof was followed by a shower of milk-colored glass, reminding my father of the vessel’s existence. After paying for the damages we left without eating, and he used the incident for years as justification not to eat out on family trips; as if the episode was a Dickensian harbinger of Vacation Mishaps Yet-To-Come.

     There were many other trips in The Van that didn’t involve property damage. We negotiated the Great Smoky Mountains en route to pre-Dollywood Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, circumnavigated both sides of Niagara Falls, and explored Amish country—more for its proximity to Hershey and its chocolate than for the cultural and educational experiences.

     Somewhere along the way the DOWD kids grew up. The Van ran out of gas and usefulness sometime in the ‘80s and eventually became a permanent fixture on the side of my parents’ house once they moved to rural Connecticut. While in college, The Van was the first thing I saw whenever I pulled up the driveway for a visit. Melanomas of rust and Bondo dotted his exterior and a family of chipmunks had taken up residence inside. I asked my father why he didn’t just junk the thing and he said he would get around to it eventually, and he did. On my first trip home after The Van’s demise I found I was a little unsettled to see it gone, and stared at the loamy, naked patch of driveway edged with burnt grass and metal flakes. The Van hadn’t gone quietly and I admired its tenacity.

     I realize now that no matter how much The Van had been an incidental bane of my pubertal existence, it represented something much deeper to my dad. As a cop, he’d spent five nights a week on the streets for twenty-three years and had missed most of what happened at home after 4:30 P.M. When he looked at The Van he saw his family’s history. He saw scenes of our collective childhood that he could relate to, and in which he had played a major role. The Van was a souvenir of all those trips we took together, before life intervened and the four DOWD kids went on to travels of their own.

     Like an ex’s name regrettably tattooed above your left butt cheek, mistakes have a way of following you around. First we fear landing on the wrong side of Santa’s Naughty/Nice list. Then there’s the threatened mark on the ubiquitous “permanent record” of adolescent academics, followed, for some, by an expungeable youth of crimes and misdemeanors. But it wasn’t until the moment he saw her in the rearview mirror, that Sam realized just how dogged a pursuer an error in judgment could be.

     No freakin’ way…

     “Can you see what the problem is?” Maggie didn’t look up from her phone. “Is there an accident?”

     Sam was so focused on the driver of the ragtop Mustang behind them he hadn’t noticed their glacial pace. His wife’s voice, accompanied by a strident blast from a neighboring vehicle, wrested his attention from the Ray-Banned brunette in the rearview.

     “I don’t think so,” he said. “I think it’s just too much traffic and not enough road.”

     “Well, it is a Saturday afternoon in October in New England,” Maggie said. She hit “Send” and looked up at her husband of seven years. “With all the leaf-peepers out you can’t be surprised it’s like this. The parking lot at the mall was insane.”

     Spending the day in the shoreline town of Clinton, Connecticut, had been Sam’s idea; an opportunity for reconnection and, perhaps, atonement. Sitting on Route 81, going nowhere, he wondered if this was the second wrong turn he’d made in the last few weeks.

He tried to gauge Maggie’s mood. The two had hardly spoken on the trip from the city. Sam drove the rented SUV and Maggie took take care of some business that apparently couldn’t wait until Monday, which was actually fine with Sam since he wasn’t quite sure what, or how much, he wanted to say.

     “Are you sorry we came?” Maggie’s answer might, he thought, make his decision an easier one.

     “What?”

     “I said, are you sorry we came?”

     “Of course not, you know how much I like to shop the outlets,” she said. “Anyway, you’re the one who was supposed to be at another conference this weekend.”

     Sam had changed his plans when he saw Maggie’s calendar was clear, an unusual occurrence as of late. Given the circumstances, he took it as a sign and decided to be spontaneous—something Maggie had always urged him to be.

     And look where’s it’s gotten me.

     “Yeah, D.C.,” Sam said. “Malloy said he’d go in my place if I stood in for him in Jacksonville next month.”

     Malloy owed him. Big. Sam had covered for his counterpart’s personal and professional transgressions many times over the years, when expenses had to be verified and asses needed to be covered, in cities up and down the Eastern Seaboard, so he’d called in his marker.

     Freakin’ Malloy.

     But Maggie was right. It was a beautiful weekend in southern Connecticut and this was the only road that led to U.S. 1 from the highway, so it made sense that between everyone trying to get to the shore roads, and everyone already on the shore roads, things would get a little crowded. Sam eased forward along the two-lane road and glanced--surreptitiously, he hoped--in the side mirror. The convertible was still there.

     “Hey,” he said. “What’d you end up buying, anyway?”

      “I was torn between two purses,” Maggie answered. “I liked them both but couldn’t decide which one I really wanted, and then this woman told me about this special sales promotion so I just got both of them.” She tilted her head, searching. “I think she said her name was Cindy.”

     The Range Rover lurched forward, then braked to a halt.

     “Sam, what the hell? What’s wrong? Are you carsick?”

     Before fate threw its sucker punch, the trip to Connecticut had begun smoothly enough. Sam and Maggie left Manhattan at seven a.m. and the changing palette of autumn’s foliage was the couple’s main topic of conversation for the first half hour past the Cross Bronx Expressway, followed by a companionable silence punctuated only by the beeping of Maggie’s phone each time she received a message—which was often.

     “Hey, honey?” Sam said. “Do you think you could send things to voicemail for a bit? You’re missing the sights.”

     Another message came in and Maggie shook her head.

     “They’ll be plenty to see when we get there. I’ll put it on vibrate so it won’t bother you.”

     “It’s not the sound,” he said. “We don’t get to spend much time together and I thought it might be nice to disconnect from everything for awhile.”

     “Well, some things can’t wait just because you finally decided to take a day off.”

     “But your calendar was empty. I checked.”

     “I have more than one calendar, Sam. You’d know that if you paid attention.”

     Not wanting to argue unless it was absolutely necessary, Sam listened to NPR and made do with Click and Clack for company. After two hours on the thruway and turnpike the couple’s first stop was Clinton Crossings, a high-end outlet mall off exit 63, where Sam successfully navigated into what looked to be the only available parking spot in Connecticut.

     “Where do you want to go first?” he said.

     “We’re here?”

     “Yep, time flies…”

     “The Coach store.” The phone vibrated in her hand. “And Ralph Lauren and Nine West, if there’s time. Oh, but first I need to get a housewarming gift for Bryan in Sur La Table.”

     That’s where Sam saw her, handling a turkey baster in the Small Kitchen Tools section of the high-end epicurean’s Eden.

     Oh, shit.

     He took cover behind a stack of boxed Halloween table settings. Standing amidst stoneware that boasted dancing skeletons and broom-wielding witches, Sam tried to calculate the odds of running into the woman with whom he’d had his one-and-only one-night stand, during a drunken hospitality suite encounter in September.

     Sam wasn’t even supposed to go to that Orlando conference, but freakin’ Malloy needed bailing out so had Sam stepped in, again, with a bucket.

     “Dude, you’re saving me. I have to make nice with the wife’s family this weekend. Besides, I’m really the one doing you the favor. I hear they have a kick-ass freebie suite and really hot booth babes. You’ll thank me later.”

     Through the haze of infidelity, Sam vaguely remembered that the leggy brunette’s name tag had read “Cindy – Connecticut,” but he was dead certain the woman now trying to decide which color spatula best went with her eyes, was the same woman with whom he had shared several shots of tequila and various bodily fluids. It had been his only post-marital indiscretion, and the impetus for his being in this off-price consumer’s paradise in the first place.

     Freakin’ Malloy.

     Luckily, Maggie had been too busy selecting a copper sauté pan that would probably never be more than a dust collector in her assistant’s newly-purchased townhouse to notice her husband’s evasive maneuver. By the time Sam collected himself enough to become discernible from the ceramic images of open-mouthed specters swirling around him, Maggie was swiping her credit card and Cindy-Connecticut was nowhere to be seen.

     They left Sur La Table and went to Ralph Lauren, where Sam donned a pair of overpriced wraparounds and a nylon bucket hat. Maggie’s inquisition as to Sam’s sudden interest in accessories was making him nervous.

     “Why are you buying a hat? You never wear hats. And you have three pair of sunglasses at home. Why didn’t you just bring one of those?”

      “I forgot, and I thought we’d buy some lobster rolls and take them to Hammonasset Beach. I figure between the sun and the sand these would come in handy.” Sam motioned with the items in his hands as his wife just looked at him.

     Maggie’s phone vibrated again and she went outside to take the call. Sam was left alone to tread water in a sea of long-sleeved Polo shirts and stylishly-tied pullover sweaters. Alone, that is, if you didn’t count the huge dilemma he was now facing.

Paying for his impromptu, yet trendy, disguise, Sam continued the internal debate that had been amplified by the culinary near-miss with his recent past. He looked out the storefront window, beyond the tasteful vignette of everything preppy, khaki, and cardigan-like, and saw his wife, deep into an animated phone conversation and oblivious to the tall brunette that had just sauntered by.

     As soon as the blood returned to his face and he was sure the tingling in his arm wasn’t a heart attack, Sam decided the beach would be as good a place as any should he decide to confess.

      “Why don’t we buy everything here and take it right to the beach?”

     Sam tried not to sound too anxious when he suggested this to Maggie, after joining her on the open-air promenade. The mall was hosting a Shoreline Oktoberfest, and the couple was standing in front of a sandwich board listing the many food stands hawking the best edibles the area had to offer. The fact that Cindy-Connecticut had disappeared in the other direction made the idea even more appetizing.

     “Well…”

     “C’mon, this way we don’t have to fight the crowds at the shore,” Sam said.

     And we can get as far away from here as soon as possible.

     Maggie slipped her phone in her pocket and nodded.

     “Okay,” she said. “You pick up the food and I’ll jump into Coach real quick. I feel like being bad, so get my lobster roll with melted butter. And don’t forget the onion rings.”

Maggie marched away and Sam couldn’t help but admire the view. He loved his wife. The only reason he cheated, he told himself, was because he had been drunk and lonely and Maggie had been so busy lately...

     Jeez, how cliché can you get?

     Freakin’ Malloy.

     A short while later, seafood and sides in hand, Sam made his way through the growing crowd and stood outside Coach waiting for Maggie to emerge. Looking through the plate glass window, past displays of accessories and bags in every size, shape, and color that somehow still managed to all look the same, he saw his wife.

     Maggie was holding a black purse in one hand and a red one in the other, speaking to someone Sam couldn’t quite see. He lifted the fat-stained paper bags to get his wife’s attention just as the person on the other end of Maggie’s conversation came in to view.

     It was Cindy-Connecticut. Sam felt the trope of his worlds colliding.

     Maybe I’m lucky and I’m just having a stroke.

     Maggie smiled and laughed with her ironic consultant, and Sam was sure the karmic guilt marked him like the grease seeping through the paper bags he held.

Hoping his wife had been too busy choosing between overpriced leather goods to notice his aborted attempt to get her attention Sam ran into the book store across the way and hid behind a cardboard cutout of Jane Austen.

     Several minutes passed, and he watched as the well-endowed harbinger of doom exited Coach and walked in the direction of the food stalls. From his covert observation post Sam then saw Maggie come out, shopping bags in hand, and scan the passing throngs for her husband. She took out her phone, dialed a number, and Sam’s phone rang.

     “Where the hell are you?” Maggie said. “I thought you were going to meet me in Coach?”

     “The coffee kicked in and I had to make a pit stop in the men’s room.” Sam stammered as if the words tripped over something on the way out of his mouth. “Don’t worry, I left the food at the stand and I’ll pick it up on the way to the car. Why don’t you just meet me there?”

     Maggie agreed, and as Sam hung up and waited for his wife to head towards the parking lot, he noticed the T-shirt on display to his left. In crimson Times New Roman on a black background, Cicero’s words spoke to Sam across the centuries: “Any man can make mistakes, but only an idiot persists in his error.”

      Et tu, Cicero?

      “Anyway I really liked both of them and didn’t know which one to get but then that woman in the store, Cindy, told me it was buy one, get one fifty-percent off, so I decided I may as well just buy them both and maybe I’ll give one of them to my niece, Kelsey, for Christmas.”

     The jarring combination of a semi’s air horn and Maggie’s voice brought Sam out of his ruminations and back to the leathered confines of the SUV. Maggie had been explaining the thought process behind her purchase of the aforementioned Coach bags, both of which now rested in the backseat. He was glad of his decision to upgrade to this behemoth, not so much for its cargo capacity, but for the way its size greatly diminished the possibility of his being identified by anyone in the convertible behind it’s bulk.

     “Did she work there? This Cindy?” He tried not to sound overly interested.

     “No,” Maggie said. “It was just some random woman who saw I was having a hard time making up my mind. She lives around here and knew about the special deal, lucky for me.”

     “Yeah, lucky.”

     “How much farther to U.S 1?” Maggie asked the question and turned her attention back to her phone while Sam struggled to concentrate on their conversation.

     “We’re almost there,” he said. “And it’s a good thing, too. Those lobster rolls are starting to smell.”

     They had progressed along Route 81 and were now underneath the railroad tracks that ran between and parallel to U.S.1 and I-95. Amtrak’s Nor’easter rumbled overhead and Sam could now see the cause of their session in blacktop purgatory was just a single traffic light with a short attention span.

     “It shouldn’t be too much longer,” he said.

     With that, a red Saab sedan in the intersection ahead began spewing steam from under its hood and exasperated passengers from all four doors.

     “You were saying?” Maggie said. She watched as the overheated car’s former occupants attempted to move the vehicle to the side of the road. “We should have waited to buy lunch at the shore.”

     Sam hoped the smell of the deteriorating crustaceans would cover the odor of his monumental flop sweat. They reached the three-way intersection and Sam tried to determine which way the convertible was planning to go. With no turn signal blinking on the car behind him, and without enough asphalt to go around the artery-clogging Swedish sedan ahead, Sam sat at the crossroads, wrestling with his conscience.

     “Screw it,” he said.

     Sam wrenched the steering wheel right at the red light, taking the tires on the passenger’s side up and over the curb, barely missing an antique hitching post and circumventing more than one precarious situation.

     Maggie’s phone fell between the seat and the console.

     “What the hell?!”

     Sam felt giddy. And he almost wet himself with relief when he saw the convertible carrying Cindy-Connecticut had turned left and disappeared into the southern New England roadscape. His adrenaline levels ebbed towards normal and endorphins filled his bloodstream, as if he’d just completed a long run.

      “Are you okay?” Maggie had fished the phone out from under her seat and was eying Sam with an expression of abstract curiosity. “You look flushed.”

     “I’m fine. The traffic just stressed me out. Hey, why don’t we dump the lobster rolls, head back towards the city, and I’ll take you out for an early dinner. You can show off one of your new bags.”

     Maybe I won’t tell her now. I’ll just wait until we get back to the city and I can think straight. That makes more sense. Things are going good right now. Yeah, I’ll wait.

      “Sounds good to me,” Maggie said. “I wound up getting more than I needed at the outlets and the traffic’s only going to get worse later. This way I can get the rest of these e-mails taken care of on the way home. And I’ll see if we can get a reservation at Bennie’s.”

     “Perfect,” Sam said. He flipped on the turn signal and headed up the ramp to I-95. Merging into the southbound traffic flow was easy, the foliage as clear and crisp as a Yankee Magazine calendar, and the bloodflow had returned to his extremities. Life was good.

     “Hey, babe, see if you can get a booth. And use the red bag tonight. A hot purse for a hot date, right? I’m no, whaddyacallit, fashionista, but I like it better than the black one.”

     Maggie stopped scrolling through her contacts and looked up at her husband, then back at the shopping bags, before returning her gaze to Sam.

     “What’s wrong?” he said. “I thought you were going to call the restaurant?”

     “I will, but first, tell me something…how did you know what color bags I was looking at?” Maggie asked. “You didn’t make it to the store, and they were already wrapped up and in the back of the car when you got in. How did you know one of them was red and the other was black?”

     Sam’s mouth went dry, he found it difficult to speak, and his mind went blank, except for the memory of the orator’s prophetic words, scarlet letters printed on a cotton/acrylic blend.

      “Sam,” Maggie said. “What’s going on?”

     Freakin’ Cicero.