“For eighteen years, Jack Wilson,” she was saying for the third time, “your father took pictures for my family, and we were never dissatisfied. I’m sure if he were back here now—if be weren’t in the hospital—”

Last evening, while we were strangling on the fumes of the newly lighted coal stove, Harriet, who is very romantic, said: “It’s the house, darling. It’s the spirit of the house asserting itself through you.”

Assunta speaks: One day my father threw me out of his house. And he threw me out even though, at that time, our family life had achieved a certain harmony; we had forsworn love of one another in favor of a new era of politeness and reserve. 

“Its only a lizard,” he muttered to himself desperately, “only a lizard.” The quick rhythm of the phrase only served to accentuate the beat of his heart and drive him further on. He walked a long way from the olive-grove, stumbling against roots, giving sudden nervous leaps.

On and off, from the slit in my blinds, I observed him, some other dude, and a lady with a broad, shaking rump who I guessed to be his mother carrying things out of the house: boxes, TVs, something covered in a baby blanket. I felt lame for wanting to be acknowledged in some way, for watching him shut them all in the van without looking back.

Mary Ann lived near me in Baton Rouge, then she was in Memphis. She’d told me they could never return. Return to this life, she meant. Her husband, Knox, I’d hated, and he’d been called, of all things, a kind man. People called him good, gentlemanly, liked to say it just that way. Her mother had. But he took Mary Ann from me, and I don’t let myself near swindlers.

She did not die with me. She died with Knox, and such a fast thing tells me this is how a life can run, gone to a Memphis firmament.

We’d first met in the Goodwood Library at the crowded bank of computers, Mary Ann in a cold metal wheelchair she paid seventy-five dollars a week to rent. I was there most Saturdays to be in the air conditioning and to use the internet, both of which were expensive at my apartment. I have a twenty-first-century disease, Mary Ann told me.

“Called what?” I said. And she didn’t know—not that she didn’t, but she wouldn’t tell. She often ached all over, couldn’t use her legs for hours. She got terrible nosebleeds that kept her up at night. I sensed her half-wakefulness, her nostalgia for the world she knew outside of dreams, though perhaps she waited to return to them. Dreams that ran through her in waves, through her defenseless bones. At the end of the first day at the library, we went to the coffee shop next door. The entrance was narrow, and I made a deep bend while holding on to her chair, pushing and summoning the will from my knees. Inside, we ordered raspberry iced tea and lavish sandwiches, but she wouldn’t eat. I watched her cry with her palms flat against her eyes and worried she’d cry so much her face would come off in her hands. 

People got out in strange ways. No stranger, I suppose, than the ways they got in.

Mrs. Rachelina’s property was typical of the crumbling Latin aristocracies. A somewhat jumbled garden, unkempt, but practical—they ate the fruit—to the east of a nineteenth-century house which was large and mostly empty. 

I had been down south before, but my mother and I had driven on I-5, not the back roads. My mother would never have stopped at the rock shop, where Bobby let us each buy a piece of agate, or the date farm, where an old man made the three of us milkshakes. 

These false-fronted buildings lived inside him, in a place deeper than consciousness.