“And then last night Pierre Lepont said, ‘Build in your own memories, this is your town.’ That was a pivotal moment for me, Lucy, because this is my town.” Mrs. Horne raised her arms dramatically, as wide as she could in the small space, and hugged herself with her eyes closed. “It’s my town, and it’s my life, all my very own!”

“Is somebody knocking?” said Lucy.

Then they heard footsteps, and there was Smash Dykes standing in the doorway of the bathroom holding a white cat by the scruff of the neck.

“Ma’am,” he said.

“Precious!” squealed Mrs. Horne. The cat dangled limp-wristed, with its tail curled under its belly and one eye pulled into a squint and its mouth pulled into a long smile. It looked at them peacefully through slitted eyes, as if in a meditative trance, and Mrs. Horne gathered it up, rump first, and cuddled it under her chin, gently swaying from side to side.

“My name is Smash Dykes, ma’am.”

Smash Dykes looked like a combination of Cool Hand Luke and Moses from a bad movie of the Old Testament. He had those blue eyes and that regal nose, and a kind of still dignity to his face, caused by badly patched-up skin-cancer surgeries. He was the only person left in Florinna who was from Florinna, and he ran Dykes’s Feed and Seed, the store his grandfather Lucien Dykes had opened in 1895. The store had crept along selling seed corn and crowder peas and fertilizer and grain to farmers in the county, but the developers of the new Florinna had set up a model farm on the outskirts of town, just for looks, with a white-painted fence and a wrought-iron gate and a bronze statue of a horse on a stone pedestal, with its head high and mane and tail flying. There were riding horses in the pasture, and a pair of Belgians to pull a wagon on parade days, and a herd of belted Galloway cows. The brand-new barn looked as if it came right out of Charlotte’s Web.

Smash Dykes himself had been turned into a kind of pet, and in the old bead-board hoppers in Dykes’s Feed and Seed he now kept fancy sweet feed and oats and organic chicken feed with no added antibiotics, where there used to be moldy scratch feed and laying mash.