“At once my left hand was snatched up with extraordinary force.

“ ‘I made Patsy stop,’ he answered.

“ ‘You almost killed Patsy!’ I countered. ‘Don’t ever hurt anyone. It’s not fun.’

“ ‘No fun,’ he wrote. ‘She stopped hurting you.’

“ ‘If you hurt other people,’ I answered, ‘I won’t love you.’

“There came a silence and a chill in the room, and then by his power the computer was turned off. Then came the embrace, and with it a faint loving warmth. I felt a vague loathing of the pleasure this embrace produced in me, and a sudden fear that it would become erotic. I don’t remember ever feeling that fear before.

“Patsy had called me a queer. Maybe I was one, I thought. Maybe I was steered in that direction. Maybe Goblin knew. Goblin and me together. Fear stole over me. It seemed like mortal sin.

“ ‘Don’t be sad, Goblin,’ I whispered. ‘There’s too much sadness as it is, at home. Go off, now, Goblin. Go off, and let me think by myself.’

“In the weeks that followed, Patsy never looked at me in quite a familiar way, but I did not want to admit to anything regarding the event on the staircase, so I couldn’t ask her what she had felt.

“Meantime everybody knew that in her bathroom in the big house she was vomiting and retching in the morning, and she took to hanging about the kitchen, saying that all the food disgusted her, and Pops, driven away from the table, spent his long hours in the shed.

“He didn’t talk to the men. He didn’t talk to anyone. He watched the television and he drank Barq’s Root Beer, but he wasn’t seeing or hearing a thing.

“Then, one night when Patsy drove up late and came into the kitchen claiming she was sick and Jasmine had to make her some dinner, Pops sat down at the table opposite her and told me to get out of the room.

“ ‘No, you let him stay if you’ve got something to say to me,’ Patsy said. ‘Go on, out with it.’

“I didn’t know quite what to do, so I stepped into the hallway and leaned against the back doors. I could see Patsy’s face, and the back of Pops’ head, and I could hear every word that was said.

“ ‘I’ll give you fifty thousand dollars for it,’ Pops said.

“Patsy stared at him for a full minute, and then she said, ‘What are you talking about?’

“ ‘I know you’re pregnant,’ he said. ‘Fifty thousand dollars. And you leave the baby here with us.’

“ ‘You crazy old man,’ she said. ‘You’re sixty-five. What are you going to do with a baby? You think I’d go through all that again for fifty grand?’