I was between schools, but it was summer anyway. The main problem was that I had no way of getting around, and there was no one my age in the little cluster of houses. Most of the people there were either young or old, with almost nobody in the middle. I think the youngest adult there was maybe in their forties, and he was a flat-top, sort of strait-laced, frumpy math teacher guy who dedicated his life to his lawn. So, I was kind of stuck there, with not much to do, and that’s how things turned out the way they turned out. I wanted to turn inward and get monastic with video games or guitar practice, something like that, but I suck at guitar and Aunt Gabrielle had exactly one “computer device” in the house and that was hers. There was a doily on top of it. I just had my phone.

Plus, the neighbors were always coming by. The house was small, although the guest room was sort of angled out from the rest of the house, protruding a bit over the edge of the hill, so I could sit in there without hearing absolutely every word they were saying. Sometimes a visitor would break away to go to the bathroom, and the conversation would swerve in my direction, then cut off abruptly. Toilet flush. Pause. Hopefully the sound of the tap running. Then the talk would resume and dwindle back toward the kitchen. From my room, I could see into the back yard of Dr. Wilson, who was a retired dentist, living next door. He had a garden and a sheltering structure for an old-time sports car roadster I never saw completely. Dr. Wilson came by every day to say hello to Aunt Gabrielle and recommend dentistry and the military to me.

“You’d be amazed at how tightly it tends to run in families,” he’d say. He was a soft-spoken man in his sixties (I think) with iron-grey hair, a deep tan. Sort of a golfer type. He’d been in the navy. I would see him sometimes jogging up that steep hill. He kept himself in shape. Once he loaned me a book about the Civil War—he was hugely interested in the Civil War. I started avoiding him after that. I didn’t want to tell that I hadn’t read it and didn’t care; I guess I was afraid of hurting his feelings.

This isn’t local color or whatever; it matters. You have to understand that Dr. Wilson was totally ordinary. Just bear with me, and you’ll get why that matters in a moment.