Tim was mad at Karen. A girl I had not gone out with for very long, but an explorer and one who urged me to cut away that residual umbilical cord, which had been long attaching me to ma and move more than twenty miles away from home. "Take your head west young man!” Karen had urged me several times through late night conversations to move to Idaho, even though we were sort of going steady at the time and she wasn’t planning on shacking west with me. You see Tim and I had long been palsy-walseys, choosing to sit next to each other in the same Nashville Cats religious class ever since we’s babies. Tim and I became quickly bored with religion class, hardly believed in miracles, and would have rather been outside. We stroked pencils against each other’s forearms, nestling in sensitivity in a seemingly sensible way; when my mother –still not yet fully rebounded from her postpartum depression - broke into the classroom to tug me away by the arm for a long intensive shamin