Connie Clifford did not move in her chair but gathered herself up, her eyes pale, lively, snapping. Then she leaned forward and looked away from Foster a moment, her eyes lighting around the room as if seeking some proof of her conviction. She looked back at him and with her voice dropping down solid on each word said, “Leah Pelham owned herself.”

He did not understand this at first and then did. Soft, he said, “Yes ma’am.”

Her glare did not relent. “People would say it was Norman made that possible. They would be wrong.”

He waited.

“She had known the worst people can offer up to one another. And walked away from that. With her head up square. And certainly she and my brother loved each other. As a young girl it was wonderful to see.” She glanced at Glen, back at Foster. “But with or without him, Leah just ate the world up. As if, you see, she not only owned herself. But owned everything she could see. I’d never known a person like that before. A woman like that.” And paused again and added, “Or since.”

Quiet then. Foster looked at the floor, the sheet of bright linoleum stretched under the furniture, not reaching the corners of the room. It was not what this great-aunt had said so much as her pitch. His voice still low he asked, “What was it happened to her?”

And Connie Clifford sat back into her chair, her hands released from the arms into her lap where they lay gnarled and twisted over each other. Her face collapsed back to her age, the skin lying loose over her skullbones. She looked down at her toiling hands. When she looked back up at him her mouth was compressed. Her eyes dimmed, someplace away. “I don’t know,” she said. “She was my friend. Was what she was.”

When he left there he did not return immediately to the farm but instead drove two blocks into downtown Randolph and parked nosed in to the curb. He wanted to be alone. So he walked among the people of the town and was alone there. It was not his father’s town; he knew that now. But it had been his grandfather’s. And his grandmother had made it her own. And now the recluse maiden aunts on the hill. The other people that were here he did not feel belonged to him. He would remain a stranger they were kind to. So finally, it was the not-so-long-dead old man and the long-dead dark-skinned woman that he felt might someway stalk within him as he walked slowly along the storefronts.

When he’d left Cliffords’ and walked around the garage to where the Chrysler was parked Aiden Clifford had come from the darkness of the shop, coming up to Foster, rubbing his hands on a dirty rag, his moon face turned down. He’d said, “It’s some car.”

“It was my father’s,” Foster told him.