“ ‘Don’t you understand, Quinn?’ she said. ‘You live in a gorgeous house and you’re eccentric and gifted like the people in these films. Aunt Queen keeps inviting you to meet her in Europe and you won’t do it. And that’s wrong, Quinn. Don’t make your world small.’

“In fact, Aunt Queen had never invited me to meet her in Europe, or, to put it more to the point, I had not known that Aunt Queen had invited me! No doubt Pops and Sweetheart knew. But I didn’t confess this.

“ ‘You have to keep on teaching me, Lynelle,’ I answered. ‘Make me into somebody who can travel with Aunt Queen.’

“ ‘I’ll do it, Quinn,’ she said. ‘It will be easy.’

“She almost made me believe it. And on she went, running rampant through archaeology and theories of evolution and dizzying lectures on black holes in space.

“She taught me to play some simple Chopin and a few exercises by Bach. She took me through the entire history of music, quizzing me until I could identify a period and a style and, even in Mozart’s case, a composer.

“I was in heaven with Lynelle.

“She taught me many Latin words to show me that they were roots for English words. She taught me to waltz, to do the two-step and the tango, though the tango made me laugh so hard that I would fall down every time we tried.

“Lynelle also brought the first computer into my bedroom, along with the first printer, and though this was long before the days of the World Wide Web or the Internet, I learned to write on this computer and managed to become very fast at typing, using the first three fingers of each hand.

“Goblin was enthralled by the computer.

“At once he took my left hand and pecked out the words ‘IloveLynelle.’ She was very pleased by this, and then, unable to free my left hand from him, I discovered myself typing all manner of words run together without spaces, and I gave Goblin an elbow in the chest and told him to get away. Of course Lynelle soothed his feelings with some kind words.

“It would be a long time before Goblin discovered that he could make words appear on the computer without my aid.

“But let me return to Lynelle. As soon as I could bat out a letter on the computer I wrote to Aunt Queen, who was on a religious pilgrimage of sorts in India, and I told her that Lynelle was a special emissary both from Heaven and from her. Aunt Queen was so pleased to hear from me that we began to exchange letters about twice a month.

“I had so many adventures with Lynelle.

“On Saturday, we went into the swamp together in a pirogue with a vow to find Sugar Devil Island, but at the first sight of a deadly snake, Lynelle positively freaked and screamed for us to head back to land. I had a gun and could have shot the snake if it had approached us, which it wasn’t doing, but Lynelle was terrified and I did what she said.