Once, years ago, I spent the day with a woman in a small town outside Kansas City. We'd only been dating a few weeks and didn't know each other that well, but we'd just had a scare and somehow we thought this outing would be a kind of litmus test for our relationship, or whatever it was we were doing.

At a kitschy winery we sampled every kind of wine they had and, feeling guilty, bought a bottle called "Twister" and took it with us to a (regionally) famous writer's house we learned about from a brochure. Neither of us had read any of the author's work, so much of the self-guided tour of the shabby Victorian was lost on us. We spent an hour beneath a large sycamore behind the house, drinking the sweet wine and joking about a photo of the author reading a book in the bathtub, his knees, head, and smooth belly poking from the water like that famous photo of the Loch Ness.

As we were leaving, we came to a four-way stop in a neighborhood not far from the author's house. Just as I was about to accelerate, a young boy, no more than 2 years-old, naked from the waist down and barefoot, wandered out into the street in front of us. I looked at the woman I was with, and her face, rosy from the wine, went slack and her mouth hung open. There was no one else in sight. Not in any of the yards on the corners, not walking on the sidewalk, and not in any cars on the street. We were together, alone. The boy toddled past the front of the car, smiling the whole time. When he made it to the sidewalk on the other side, the woman and I looked at each other again. She slowly reached for my hand resting on the console and squeezed it. I gunned it through the intersection, tires chirping on the pavement.

In the rearview mirror, the boy stopped and turned in our direction. I watched as he got smaller and smaller until I could no longer see him. Later, the woman cried and gripped my hand harder as I drove.

I wonder sometimes, when it's late at night and she's in a lover's bed, does she tell this story the same as I do?