He does not know how to answer and the ceramic children make him uneasy and his mouth is full besides.

“Have another.”

The second is even better than the first. Who would bake a plate of cookies only to throw them away?

“Your father is the new one, isn’t he? At the mill? With the shoulders.”

He manages a nod. Jesus stares down unblinking. Mrs. Boydstun takes a long inhalation of smoke. Her manner is casual but her attention is ferocious and he thinks of Argus Panoptes, the watchman of Hera, who had eyeballs all over his head and even on the tips of his fingers, so many eyes that when he closed fifty of them to sleep he held fifty more open to keep watch.

He takes a third cookie.

“And your mother? Is she in the picture?”

Zeno shakes his head, and suddenly it feels airless in the house, and the cookies are turning to clay in his gut, and Athena whines on the porch, and waves of guilt and confusion break over Zeno with such force that he backs away from the table and hurries outside without saying thanks.

The following weekend he and Papa attend a Sunday service with Mrs. Boydstun where a pastor with wet underarms warns that dark forces are gathering. Afterward the three of them walk back to Mrs. Boydstun’s house, and she pours something called Old Forester into matching blue tumblers, and Papa switches on her Zenith tabletop wireless, sending big band music through the dark, heavy rooms, and Mrs. Boydstun laughs a big tooth-filled laugh and touches Papa’s forearm with her fingernails. Zeno is hoping she will put out another plate of cookies when Papa says, “You plays outside now, boy.”

He and Athena walk the block to the lake and he builds a miniature kingdom of the Phaeacians in the sand, replete with high walls and twig orchards and a fleet of pine cone ships, and Athena fetches sticks from up and down the beach and carries them to Zeno so he can throw them into the water. Two months ago he would have been ecstatic to spend time in a real house with a real fireplace and a Buick Model 57 in the driveway, but right now all he wants to do is walk home to the little cabin with Papa so they can heat canned noodles on the stove.