“And I am going to call Mozelle and tell her Clarence is putting rank strangers to bed on that lovely ivory linen spread with the hand-tatted inserts,” said Esther. “I may just have to pull out of that mall. There’s more money down at the beach anyway.”

“Well, what was he doing here?” said Big Jim. “Where was he going?”

“He was on his way to Pensacola,” said Charlene.

After some disgruntled shuffling around on the porch, they all finally went down the steps and back home, mumbling and muttering, and Charlene was alone—just her and Mars, low and red in the sky behind her.

When Charlene finally got to bed, she could not sleep. She lay there and lay there, squirming and flapping the covers. She kept thinking about Larry’s breath, smelling like coffee and cigarettes and peppermint, and Esther’s snipey little face and her shrill, fast talk.

Let her take her tacky stuff to the beach! thought Charlene. Esther called it “collectible”; Clarence called it junk. Then Charlene thought about the stranger, at this very moment peacefully sleeping in the little four-poster bed. She hoped he wouldn’t get cold, that the lights from 90 wouldn’t shine in his eyes, that the train wouldn’t wake him up when it came through at two thirty.

Charlene slept fitfully. In the middle of the night she woke up with a start, feeling that someone was watching her, someone with a big face and a little sly smile and hair curling to his shoulders. Benjamin Franklin’s face was on a hundred-dollar bill, she remembered, and that wad of bills in the man’s pocket must have been an inch thick. Her thoughts came one by one, not crowding, but each taking its turn. “Pensacola,” he had said, but then later “Biloxi.” “Yes,” he had said to Clarence, “at Axelrod’s, something in the transmission.” But Axelrod’s was closed Mondays, just like Mamie’s.

Charlene put on her clothes and drove down to the antique mall. It had turned cold and a column of steam rose off Lake Despera and spread through the town, muffling the glow of the streetlights.

He was awake, too, prowling around in the antique mall like a cat. He let her in without a word. Charlene made up the little four-poster bed, smoothing Mozelle’s linen bedspread tight and checking for snagged threads. She stacked Esther’s dishes neatly. There were no chips. The man just stood by the door, watching and waiting.

“Come on,” said Charlene. “Get in the car. I’m going to take care of you.”

They drove west on 90, then turned north on 331, toward Alabama. “Fasten your seat belt,” said Charlene. Once they got out of the reach of the mist of Lake Despera, it was a clear night, with the moon glowing on barn roofs and making shadows in the woods and silvering up the backs of Charolais cows in the fields.