• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“A lot of them are friends from school,” I demurred. “I could only keep track of them through the wonders of Facebook, honestly.”

“So this is all for planning your trip?”

I nodded. “Going to try to crash on as many couches as possible.” Divans, futons, davenports, and settees were also a possibility; anything to keep expenditures down. But I didn’t want to come off as a cheapskate this early in our courtship, so I didn’t elaborate.

“You’ll have such an amazing adventure,” Jane said. She looked a bit wistful.

She couldn’t be missing me in advance, I thought. Could she? I chided myself for vanity, but the thought remained. However, I never stopped to consider the perils of missing her. “There’s going to be a website that you can follow,” I blurted.

For the sake of the greater mission, I had to pave the way for TEAL in the meadows of the InterWeb. I envisioned keeping a blog of the trip so that interested net-trawlers could track my progress. Merely fixing the typos was not enough; I wanted people to know what I’d be doing, and to have a record of every vile typo vanquished. I’d post before and after pictures of each typo and update my kill count at the close of each entry.

“I see,” she said. Then, casually: “So who’s designing it?”

This time I got the message. Jane did ply the innards of websites for a living. With her considerable expertise in Flash, she could build an attractive site around the blog. It’d be a much better production than whatever awkward code I could paw together. “Nobody yet,” I said, keeping my tone neutral. “Say, what’s your going rate?”

“Ten Twizzlers an hour!” she proclaimed, and went off to raid my candy supply.

After we’d been dating for about three months, I realized that my Weltanschauung had undergone a subtle but measurable shift—Jane was now in everything I saw. No one else had ever cut such a finely limned cookie on the dried batter of my heart. Taking a three-month journey without seeing her at all would be a swift invitation to madness. This became ever clearer as I got down to planning the journey day by day, stop by stop, and I gained a visceral understanding of how long seventy or eighty days straight on the road would really be. When I’d sown the seed of this typo-hunting idea in the black soil of my brain, I’d been prepared to abandon every aspect of my former life. But as 2007 yielded to 2008, I found that I needed to drag Jane across the boundary with me. One early January eve, as we were playing Phase 10 again, this time at her apartment, with the green-line trolley screeching on its tracks outside and soused frat boys screaming along to “The Final Countdown” on some nearby fire escape, I said, “Come with me.”

“Hunh?” Jane had thrown down a Skip card.

“You should come with me,” I said again. “For part of the trip.”

She gave me a big grin, and finally I saw that I should have asked her a lot sooner. “When, where, Jeff-Bear?” she sang.

“From Seattle to, uh, somewhere east?” Josh would be parting ways with me right at the last critical turn of my compass, and I’d be left alone to face a three-thousand-mile eastward journey. “In late April. Time-wise, it would be about the middle of my trip.”

“Sure,” she said, adding gamely, “I love road trips!” Jane would have preferred to go to California. She was such a good sport, though, that it didn’t ultimately matter to her where we went, be it Mission Street or Missoula. She was sure we’d have fun anywhere. That kind of optimism tends to be self-fulfilling, and contagious. Wouldn’t it be a touch romantic, I thought, or at least Romantic, to experience the wide and unblemished Western plateaus with this shyly smiling nymph beside me? We could dare the plains and the mountains together, under gray skies and fair, our two tiny islets of warmth shielded all around by a sea of empty miles.

“Hurrkk!” One of the frat-boy revelers outside was evidently unpacking the contents of his stomach.

“Can you take a week off?” I asked. Jane’s webmistressing skills were in high