“I’ll tell you what,” she said. “Why don’t you open the door and for the two minutes it takes you to get dressed we can be grown up about it. How’s that sound to you, Foster Pelham?”

He rubbed his hand over his face. Tried to scrub through his hair to flatten it down into a single piece. He could feel the silent dogs behind him. He said, “How’d you know my name?”

It was quiet a moment and then when her voice came back it was still low but for a moment all the humor was gone from it. “What do you think? I just fell out of the sky?”

“I drove by three or four times this evening and that big fancy car I’d never seen before was parked out front and then when I came by again and it was finally gone he was gone too and I didn’t know what to think but it had caught my attention I can tell you that. So I rode around some more and went out to the house and had some supper and was on the porch and what did I see go by but that very car and I could see him setting up there beside you, him that never goes anywhere unless he’s dragged and then not very far or for very long. So there wasn’t anything for it but to come back over here and see what kind of business he was wrapped up in. I went up to the windows and watched the two of you eating one of his famous soup suppers, now that’s something you don’t want to get involved with more times than you have to, not if you value variety in your diet. Or meat. I’ve not yet seen that man eat a piece of meat. So I waited until he bundled you off out here to bed and let myself in and had a little talk with him. Uncle Lex, he can’t keep much from me I tell you that right up front. To most folks he’s a zipper-mouth but I can wheedle about anything out of him. I call him Uncle Lex but he’s my great-uncle which I’m not about to call him because it would swell his head and seeing how he’s already tilted off some little bit it would do neither one of us any good. He’s a regular squirrel I tell you, the same as me. The only difference is he’s a man and a old one too so people let him be instead of fussing after him like they do me, behind my back and to my face too, how I should be carted off I guess for a rest cure somewhere. Up to the mountains, to Asheville where there’s sanitariums thick as ticks although I don’t even like the sound of that word. Sanitarium. It sounds like I’m not clean enough. Or what they really want is to marry me off so I can get stuck out on some dirt farm somewhere and be as loopy as I want and only have a husband to inflict myself on but I don’t want any of that either. The only husbands I’ve seen so far I’d probably have to do in with a axe, that’s how tedious they seem to me, and the only other ones would probably take the same axe to me, which doesn’t strike me as much fun either. There’s boys that can be fun but they all turn into husbands sooner or later too. Not that I rule anything out. I can tell you this though, I’m not one of those brainless little girls who wants to run off to California and be in the pictures. There is some kind of evil in that notion, some pure evil is what I think. So what do you want to do?”