MY FRIEND and I veered east on Highway 48 in northwestern Wisconsin as we headed for a July writers festival in my secondhand 1995 Geo Prizm, its metallic pale blue hood mottled with dark splotches as if decomposing. The previous owners, the nuns of Saint Benedict’s Monastery in St. Joseph, Minnesota, near where I live, had patched a hole in the front bumper with turquoise duct tape. I’d pulled it off, preferring the frank appearance of the puncture. A fringe of tape threads hung on and fluttered in the wind. The nuns had left a rosary in the glove box.
I’d named that car Subtle Power.
The day before the festival, my friend, a poet, had two teeth pulled and didn’t want to drive her somewhat better car because of the painkillers. She was working a factory temp job over the summer assembling insulin injector pens in rural Polk County. She had put the dentist’s bill on her credit card.
“I’ll have to work another couple weeks to pay it off,” she said. “School starts in a month, and then I’ll be tutoring again, up to $100 a day, as long as the students show up.” She’d left her adjunct teaching job and the long commute to the University of Wisconsin in Eau Claire two years earlier and was now helping at-risk students with their coursework at the local high school.
The financial tightrope I walked was equally tenuous. I’d opened a simple artists retreat for the
