She let the car warm up while she fumbled with her tapes. Her stepdad’s new car had both a tape deck and a CD player, which was either unnecessary or really cool, she couldn’t decide. She was amazed when he bought it. He had driven the same Volkswagen Rabbit he’d had since grad school until last year when he bought the Saab. Marnie had never driven a car so solid and clean before without the overbearing feeling of how much it would cost if she actually bought it. She didn’t really like cars, but she couldn’t ignore the harmony of the thing, which she might have called sublime if it weren’t a consumer product, though the little buttons on the stereo were definitely not designed for gloved fingers. She stuck a tape in, pressed rewind, backed out into the snow, and winced as the garage door roared awake, descending. It was snowing harder than she’d thought. The porchlights caught a wide globe of flakes blowing through. She turned the wheels and the snow groaned and wrinkled under the tires, sounding like something heavy and glass being dragged across rubber. She straightened out and pulled forward slowly through the tire tracks in the snow that had softened and rounded with the extra snowfall. The tape player had some sort of auto-detect feature, and right as she got to the end of the driveway and checked for traffic coming down Stadium, it clunked to a stop and began playing The Book of Love. It surprised Marnie, and she stopped the car. The engine purred and the heater hushed as the opening notes resonated. Inside the car it smelled of leather and wool and stale heater air. She watched the snow in the headlights for a second and then ejected the tape. She didn’t want to think about Aaron. She pulled out of the driveway.    The town was deserted. She put a CD from her stepdad’s 5-disk Pablo Casals set, and the music seemed to carry the car through the snow, under the pale orange street lights, past the gigantic U of M stadium, and past Marnie’s high school into the quiet, dark streets of the Old West Side. She followed the familiar sequence of her favorite houses and trees on the route to Derek’s. She always thought his block was a little more raggedy and un-bourgeois than the rest, and his house was the most endearing on the block, not just because she knew the extensive history of its perpetual remodeling. As soon as she spotted Derek on his porch, underdressed for the cold as usual, Marnie snapped out of it and realized that she never called to say she was close. He saw her and dodged inside to turn off the porchlight and grab a hat. Derek jumped down the steps and ran up to the car. Marnie leaned over to open the door for him, and he came in with a blast of cold wind and snow and a big smile.    He plopped into the deep passenger seat and pulled his hat off. “Hi!” he said, still smiling.    Marnie put her hand on the parking brake but didn’t release it and looked at him. They’d seen each other twice in the last two years, but the time between visits always felt both longer and shorter than it really was. “Hi,” she said, sounding relieved in a way.    They reached over and hugged tight. He was wearing the same black felted-wool coat his dad used to wear when they were in high school. He got it as a hand-me-down the winter before, and they agreed that it made him look much older. She scrunched her nose between his collar and his hair and hugged him half-again, harder, and they let go.    “So good to see you!”    “Yeah.”    She released the brake and they drove off.