Like I said, I could see into his yard from my room. We were a little higher than his house, so I could see down into it. So, I would see him back there, doing chores from time to time. He went back to his garage a lot, and now we’re getting into it. Every now and then I’d hear him talking, and once I glanced outside and he was coming out of the garage, talking, not on a phone, but to someone else who was still inside the garage. There was no doubt about it; he was clearly telling someone something that had only just occurred to him as he was leaving. He used to do that with my Aunt Gabrielle, so that you couldn’t be sure when he was getting ready to go or getting ready to launch into another long bit about photography, the Civil War, football. He was doing that with someone in his garage, though, even though he lived alone. I mean, no one told me he lived alone, but no one ever mentioned anyone else living there with him. I think he was saying something about remembering to do this or that, like he was giving someone advice about a task. It’s one of those memories you forget until something makes you remember, and you come back to it and see it in a new light.

What made me remember that was seeing him working on the car with someone else, maybe a week later. There were tarps up, hanging from a frame that suspended them over the car, so I couldn’t see much of the other person, only that it was someone big, but once they came around to the nearer side and I saw their shadow through the tarp, and they had some kind of wiggly things sticking out of their head. I couldn’t figure it out. It was weird. So, I remembered it. And I wondered if that was the person in the garage.