“What about On the Road?”
“Oh, that,” she said. “Pfft. Kerouac was a Martian on crank. Dope fiend prose isn’t fit for human consumption.”
“Thompson isn’t a dope fiend?”
“No. That was just a put-on. He wrote about drugs, not on drugs.”
“Have you read Kerouac?”
“I couldn’t get into it,” she said.
He pulled sharply off the road and into a parking lot.
“What’s this?” she said.
“The library,” he said. “Come on.”
It smelled just as it had when he was 17, standing among the aisles of the biggest collection of books he’d ever seen. Sweet, dusty.