The world is beveled with rain, an angular downpour that slants under the terminal canopy, grasping wetly at my cargo pants and hiking boots. I stand there indifferently, gazing into the headlights that slow and pause and speed up again. Beside me is a businesswoman in a black tailored pantsuit with gangsta pinstripes. She’s trying to keep her Manolo Blahnik ankle boots dry, bending at the waist like a cheap stripper, poking her head into the rain to spot her ride. I watch her antics with a smile ghosting through my facial muscles. If Nooshin was wearing those stiletto heels, she’d bump her head on the sky.

A tricked-out 4×4 veers to the curb in a growl of wasted horsepower. The dude behind the wiperblades is wearing a cowboy hat and a hundred-mile stare. Nothing flickers in him. I play to imagine the cause of his boredom. Maybe the traveler who’ll climb into his passenger seat. Maybe the kind of relationship that reduces a man to glorified airport taxi. Or maybe he’s just sick to fucking death of the face that greets him in the mirror every morning.

An airport cop saunters through the traffic. He’s wearing a rain condom over his hat. A Batman utility belt jiggles on his meaty hips. It’s reflex to duck behind a pillar, glancing at his sidearm — still holstered. I unclench my body slowly, one muscle at a time, talking myself down from the culture shock. Dude. Get a grip. This is America, not Mexico. That cop might give a Big Mac a hard time, but he isn’t roughing up citizens for bribes.

Finally I spot the antiquated Ford F-150 in all its two-toned glory, white and aqua velva. Wendy’s hand-me-down from Dad, same way he gave me the keys to the Explorer when I graduated from high school. But the pickup isn’t gliding through traffic in her usual style. It progresses in a series of leaps and halts. The pale visage behind the steering wheel is on a nervous pivot, jerking between the curbside mob and the taillights in front of him. It must be Glenn, my sister’s longtime boyfriend. He hates to drive stick. I trot into the rain to intercept him before somebody’s bumper gets dinged.

Glenn is a misanthropic software geek who resembles a velvet Elvis painting, the few heroin addicts I’ve known, a used-up dishrag. He greets me with a pallid smile and a handshake like melting wax. His wispy black hair sticks out in a ratty halo, and his eyes are round and thin-lashed. A goatee straggles down the lower half of his face. He raises an open packet of beef jerky. “You want something to eat?”

“No thanks,” I mutter, tossing my backpack on the seat and belting in. “How is he?” I don’t have to specify the pronoun.

“Still alive, last I heard.” Glenn pulls away from the curb with excruciating slowness. A spacious gap in traffic floats past. His Doc Marten stays on the brake pedal.

“You want me to drive?” I offer.

“Uh, sure.”

I wait for him to fumble the old Ford into park, enduring a wan rant about stickshifts and Wendy’s stubborn refusal to upgrade to something new and automatic. That’s the thing about me and my siblings — we’ll drive our hand-me-downs until they shred into rust. You can take the kids out of the parsimonious Roberts family, but you can’t take the parsimonious Roberts family out of the kids.

Then it’s back into the rain. Glenn and I pass each other in front of the headlights, two cones of drenched light. We brush shoulders like strangers on a crowded sidewalk. I feel like I should apologize — for the harsh thoughts in my head, his exposure to my fucked-up family, everything. But the moment vanishes with his face, and I’m looking across a shuffling line of wet cars and Somali-piloted taxis drowning in wait and a massive cement parking garage swimming into the sky. He and Wendy have been together for 10 years and I can’t even remember his last name.

Behind the pickup’s wheel I’m a teenager again, flashbacking to the driving lessons Wendy gave me when she was home from college. It was a boiling summer day with heat waves rising off the gravel road. The windows were rolled down and locusts flitted in and out of the cab like tiny crashlanding helicopters. She was wild and ponytailed and laughing, even when I stalled out for the bazillionth time.

It should’ve been Brian who taught me how to drive. I wanted it to be my big brother. I didn’t idolize him — there was nobody worth idolizing in my family — but I still craved his approval, since approval was always in short supply. I could lay down a perfect weld and Dad would find something wrong with it, Mom would turn up her nose at my straight A’s and give me shit about not being valedictorian. But Brian was already a distant figure even across the breakfast table. Losing himself in the daily rituals of farming. Making friends of dusty cropland and feed animals. Rejecting us in his own way, I suppose.

I start to imagine him flat on his back in an intensive care ward, hooked up to a mess of tubes and wires, missing half his head, unmoving –

No. I push the vision away.

Glenn munches contentedly on jerky while I guide the F-150 through a maze of twisting access roads to the highway beyond. Jets scrape overhead in a blaze of noise and lights. Exit signs announce our transit through a bucolic suburbia — Fort Snelling State Park, Mendota, Mall of America, Apple Valley, Minnesota Zoo, Lakeville. I know 25 million people in Mexico City who’d give their right arm to live here.

“I always thought it would be Wendy,” Glenn says suddenly, staring at the hypnotic motion of the windshield wipers. “You try as many times as her…”

His secret fear is the most depressing thing in the world. A decade with my sister and he still doesn’t understand that her tentative suicide “attempts” are just another form of communication. Pleas for attention. Notice me, Mom and Dad. But Wendy doesn’t hate them — or herself — enough to really want to die.

I blow a long sigh into the windshield. “Thank god for SSRIs, huh?”

He glances sideways at me. “What?”

“SSRIs. Selective seratonin reuptake inhibitors. Prozac, Paxil — ”

“Zoloft. She’s on Zoloft now.” Glenn splays fingers across his shirt, absentmindedly wiping a greasy hand. “Me too, actually.”

That’s it for conversation for a while. We’re past the last tendrils of the Twin Cities and into the darkness of farmland. My gaze flicks between mileage signs and my speedometer. Six months of everything in kilometers and it’s like I’ve flipped an invisible switch. I wonder why the reverse culture shock isn’t bad this time. Probably because I didn’t lose myself in Mexico the way I usually do. I’ve been with Nooshin, speaking English every day, playing cultural tour guide.

As if reading my mind, Glenn stirs from his reverie. “Wendy told me that you and your girlfriend are going to have a kid.” He sharpens his tone — at himself, not me. Trying to remember. “This is a new one, right? Not the girlfriend you had in LA.”

“Yeah. Her name’s Nooshin. She’s my research assistant. We got, uh…” The F-150 is cruising in fifth gear, so I can shrug with my right shoulder. “We got…involved.”

“Sounds messy.”

“Nah, it’s cool. We’re in love.” The word feels strange in my mouth. I’m not used to saying it. Not even to Nooshin.

“Me and Wendy, we’re not going to have kids. That’s just not where it’s at for us.” He folds his pale arms across his chest, a gesture that could be defiant — or defensive. “Who wants to bring kids into a world like this? Everything is so fucked up.”

I’m already braced for the soundtrack of America — privileged diatribes woven out of shocking ignorance — but Glenn spares me. His sallow face stretches in a yawn. He goes back to his windshield trance, only humming this time. The noise is tuneless and irritating as hell.

Pointedly, I flip through a sleeve of Wendy’s CDs, searching for something to play on the only upgrade she’s made to the pickup — a sleek Blaupunkt audio system half-hidden under the dash. Her musical tastes don’t really map to mine. Most of the discs are MTV rap crap. Finally I grab something by a band called LCD Soundsystem and pop it into the stereo. The beats are downtempo and remixed and overlaid, with atmospheric hoarse-throated vocals on top. I find myself hanging on every lyric:

What we want
Sex with TV stars
What you want
A career in the
HA-HA-HA-HA
HA-HA-HA-HA

I tap the back button, playing that passage again and again, letting the cartoonish laughter mock me in waves. The lead singer was envisioning me, standing at a fork in my life. In one direction, a career in academia — now there’s a hardy-har-har. In the other direction, a career in whatever happens after you drop out of academia. Maybe that’s what an M.A. in Latin American Studies buys you in Corporate America. A big round of derisive laughter and a paycheck to match.

“Are you excited for the new Indiana Jones movie?” asks Glenn, and the pilgrimage to my brother’s shattered body wears on.