In the Company of Educated Men

Ten years after a cross country road trip changed his life unalterably, Lennie Ashland finally tries to understand how everything, from so innocent a motive, went so horribly wrong.

Soon after graduating from Harvard at the dawn of the Reagan 80s, Lennie’s father died, leaving him wealthy, and lost. Deciding to see the country he called home but knew mainly through his own and others’ picture-book visions, he coaxes, cajoles, and bribes his two best college friends, Paul and Louisa, to join him in a cross-country trip—of course in a 70s vintage land yacht car. Through sheer bad luck they interrupt an attempted gas station robbery gone sideways and find themselves with a gun-toting teen in the back of their car, a youth Lennie finds fascinating for many of the wrong reasons, a youth with a gun who wears guileless innocence like clothes. As if the gods themselves were taunting them, they attract a 10-year old stowaway who imagines them a respite from her own domestic hell, and thus a strange family begins to bond, even as fissures mount between the recent graduates about the gravity of, and how to deal with their extraordinary situation. And then it explodes. With the speed residual mess of a bullet, the goal becomes to stay alive. Lennie’s life stopped with that trip. Now, revisiting the people and places, he honestly tries to get it back.

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