Amos wanted Professor Pete to help him figure out a way to beat the road but Pete, he didn't look too happy. "I was a history teacher," he said, "not political science. The one you need to talk to is Sam."

"Sam who?" I said.

"Sam," he said, staring at me. "You know. Sam. Your Sam."

"My Sam?"

"Sam LaFrenese. Isn't she your girlfriend?"

I must have looked as stupid as I felt. It wasn't that I didn't know who he was talking about, it was that I never thought of her as somebody a professor would think knew more than him. About anything. "Why Sam?" I said.

"You don't know?"

"Know what?"

"Sam's the one who stopped the tunnel the state was going to build through Bear Mountain."

"She did?" This was news to me.

He looked at me real funny. "Last year. You didn't know about that?"

"She was goin to a lot of meetin's, that's all I knew. Is that what they was about?"

"And she was on the committee that wrote the law that created the new solid waste district in Waldo County--"

"What?" Amos said because Pete had let his voice drop a little.

"The trash district," Pete yelled. "She wrote the law that made it."

"Sam?" I said. "My Sam?" I couldn't get over it. "My Sam did all that?"

"You two ought to talk once in while," Pete said, and shook his head at me all sad like somebody does when they see you messing up and there ain't nothing they can do about it. I kind of figured he was right, so when I left his place it was after 5 so I figured Sam would be home and I went over her place.

Sam's got this little cabin about half the size of mine, not that mine is anything to brag about. It ain't hardly bigger than your living room, probably, but she's got a little stove and sink in one corner that don't take up too much room and a john sort of tacked on to the other corner and a loft where she sleeps. She built it herself and it looks like it but she did a lot better job than Pete--at least it's tight in the winter and the wind don't whistle through it. She's got a big square woodstove right in the middle and just one little log will keep that sucker warm as toast all night as long as it ain't too far below freezing outside. And the walls is straight.

She just got home from work and hadn't even got changed yet when I walked in. She was all surprised, she wasn't expecting me, did I want some supper, all that. I said, "So you wrote that trash law?" and she said "What?" and I said, "That law that made up the county trash district, you wrote it?" and she said, "I was on the committee that wrote it, yeah. Why?" and I said, "How come you never told me that?" After Cyn, I guess I wasn't in too much of a mood to put up with another woman that meant something to me keeping secrets. She said, "I told you," and I said, "Like hell you did," and I was all set to get let her have it but then she said, "Sure I did, you remember, a couple years ago when I was working for Ginny, and you said you figured you'd just go on dumping your trash in the woods behind your cabin like you always have and I said you wouldn't be able to do that any more, you might go to jail, and you said what's this goddam state coming to. Remember?" And I did. I remembered saying that but I didn't remember her telling me she wrote that damn law, but I suppose she must have if she says she did. Sam don't lie about stuff like that. "Something wrong?" she says.

Well, I spent so much time getting myself worked up over this secret I thought she had that I guess I just wasn't willing to let go, so I was still feeling pretty grumpy and looking for something to be grumpy about, so I said, "Seems I'm the last one in town to know you're a expert on gettin the state to do what you want," and I swear to God she blushed. Her face got red as a July beet and she kind of looked down at the floor and she said, "Oh, I'm not an expert, I just helped out," and I said, "Yeah, well, that's not what Professor Pete says. He says you know more about it than he does."

"Really?" she said with a big smile, "Pete said that?"

And right then it dawned on me she really didn't know she was a expert. She didn't think of it that way, she just thought of it as something she'd been doing to help out, and I don't know what it was, was it the smile or the way she never even thought of taking credit for it or what it was, but all of a sudden I just wanted to scoop that woman up in my arms and dance around with her. So I did.

You know, you can spend a lot of time with somebody for a long while, years maybe, and if you don't pay attention you can find out you didn't really know them at all. There she'd been doing all that and I didn't know nothing about it because she was too shy to tell me and I was too all-fired selfish to ask. Sometimes life is a real kick in the ass, you know?