"To Bangkok."
"Then go," said Nawin indifferently. He was meaning more the boy exiting to his home than a departure from Nongkhai that could link the youth to him as inextricably as blood sucking ticks or bacteria and the ensuing infection gained from a water monitor's mouth (these crocodilian reptiles, frequent inhabitants at the Nakhon Pathom campus at Silpakorn University).
"Who would I stay with. I don't know anyone there except you."
"Do you live with your parents?"
"Yeah."
"What do they do?"
"Mother's a nurse, father's paralyzed. The story goes that soldier's thought he was one of a group of drug smugglers coming across the boarder and shot. He's been that way since I was young."
"You don't like it—staying with them?"
"Working part time at the Seven [Thai for 7-11] and then taking care of him so that she can go to work? Hardly."
"You won't stay there forever. Everything passes." He was half thinking about the strawberry and jasmine garden at his mother and father's home that he loved so much in his boyhood, of hawking jasmine rosaries in streets within stalled traffic and strawberry drinks in transparent plastic cups from sidewalks. He was thinking of the words mother and home that a child thinks of as permanent as the sun.