The ads ran for their prescribed time and then disappeared. Marya heard nothing. She realized from the several days of sharp depression that followed that she had actually expected a response. Perhaps she was only eight years old after all—perhaps not that much time had elapsed.

THEN, THE FOLLOWING spring, she went back to Innisfail for her brother Joey’s wedding.

The Knauers had entered a period of prosperity. The Canal Road had long been paved, the Innisfail Pike was a four-lane highway, Everard’s service station had been moved to a larger garage, the old car lot—that graveyard of derelict rusting hulks—was hidden from the road by a trim ten-foot redwood fence. The old house was unrecognizable behind white aluminum siding and smart red shutters. There was a glassed-in porch, there was a carefully tended lawn, there were trellises with yellow climbing roses. Everard and Wilma lived alone here now: Wilma had her own car and worked part-time at the Innisfail hospital as a receptionist.

Over the years Everard had been buying up land along the Canal Road, most of it scrubland, wild and marshy, worthless for farming. But now people were buying in the area; building houses; there was even talk of a subdivision—“Pinewood Acres”—on the Innisfail Pike. And at the intersection with the pike Everard owned twelve acres of flat, cleared land, “prime” land he called it, leased at the present to an Innisfail entrepreneur who organized farmers’ open-air markets, flea markets, auctions, and the like, held on summer weekends. On the Friday Marya drove up for her brother’s wedding she was astonished to see a carnival of some kind being held on the lot: a children’s Ferris wheel, a merry-go-round, perhaps a dozen booths, several tents; she heard the amplified twang of country-and-western music. Here, where in the old days there had been nothing but scrub willow, oak, grass!—a small wilderness no one had noticed.

She sat in her car for a while watching the activity at the carnival. Listening to the whine of the country music—slapdash and melancholy at once, rather romantic, hokey. These are others’ memories, she thought calmly. Other children, young girls. The world filling up with memories.

Marya’s aunt and uncle were in high spirits though Everard was heavier than Marya recalled: his torso fatty, belly straining at his belt. The look of prosperity? self-assurance at last? And Wilma was almost aggressively trim—her hair curled, frizzed, tinted; nails manicured. She even wore white linen slacks. And white sandals, Italian-looking, with a small stylish knobby heel. “Here you are at last!” she said, hugging Marya hard as if she’d been waiting for her for a long time.

The old flash of grief, half-angry affection, remorse: Wilma wasn’t the right person. Wilma stood in her place but she wasn’t the right person.