"Go then," she told him. "She's in Kansas. The walk should be good for you. Be careful not to take the detour to Timbuktu." She pulled off the side of the road and let him out; waited in dismay for a while as he went some blocks within a premature bout of independence; and then stalked him for another six blocks despite the fact that he was trying to make himself stealth through the yards of homeowners. At last, tiring, he got inside the car. She laughed hysterically, slipped a wad of chewing tobacco into her mouth, and continued on her quest for Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. Despite genuinely believing that his sullen hatred toward her would go on forever in obdurate wordlessness, the need to dig himself out of the coffin and dirt of silence exhumed him. "I want to go see Aunt Peggy," he said in an exasperated monotone. "Well, you see her every time you open those Christmas cards of hers and those scary photographs of her fall from her flowery notes of love as well as all those exotic European stamps and paper currency from her trips here and there." "I never meet her. She wants to meet me and yet I never meet her." "We live kind of far away." "You have money. I want you to put me on an airplane and fly me to Kansas." "I don't have much money anymore. I won't until I sell some paintings; but you are a child. What do you know of any of that? Your concerns are keeping a kite sailing in the breeze. What do you know of finances and paying bills? What do you care about it?" "I want to go there for Thanksgiving." "You, my dear, are free to want whatever you please but getting it is another matter." He fell into his morose ruminations. "What about my father?" "I wouldn't know anything of him." It was a preposterous claim; and to think that such an easily scaled wall would stop the besiegement was even more absurd. Quickly recognizing her underestimate she fortified the wall. "Some cowboy intellectual who mounted me or I mounted him one time. I don't remember which. I don't remember anything about him." "Mounted?" "Sex. Do you understand what sex is?" "Of course." "You know only the word--you can't define it and have yet to experience it." "I know more than the word--a guy wanting some fun from rubbing his smelly penis against somebody else's naked body--white liquid comes out." She was surprised to hear such a perfectly barbaric definition that few adults would care to espouse and she looked on him admiringly. "Did one of your friends say that?" "Yes," he lied. "Out of the mouths of babes," she said. "Come on. Just cheer up and let's enjoy our time together." "Where are you going?" he demanded. "I don't know. I'm just looking at houses. If there is one shaped like a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup let me know and we'll go inside."