THE BOY’S NAME was Mel. Ever since his mother had died of breast cancer a year ago, he had lived with his grandmother, who thought up worthwhile projects for him such as charting rainfall amounts and raising rabbits for meat—“to keep his mind off it,” she said. But lately Mel had been spending most of his spare time sitting at the picnic table down at the new Citgo Gas Station and Cigarette Outlet, watching women vacuum out their cars.

When his mother had died, the counselor had given his grandmother a little book to read about grief, dividing it up into five stages, and she didn’t see how hanging around down at the gas station fit into a stage of grief. “You’re loitering!” she said.

Mel wasn’t sure what loitering meant, but he didn’t like the sound of it. It seemed like it must have something to do with the way he sometimes felt about certain women and the vacuum cleaner, when they would go down under the backseat with it, or crawl around in the backs of the station wagons and wuuhmp!—that satisfying sound when the vacuum would suck up a candy wrapper or the cellophane off a cigarette pack.

In fact, at certain moments at the Citgo, Mel would feel so happy he could hardly believe it—the flap of the little plastic flags; the angle of the morning sun; a whiff of gasoline and hot dogs; Nancy, the itinerant gardener, who was always nice to him, digging in the corner flower bed; and Gabby broadcasting Country Like It Used to Be on the radio, saying, “And now a new hour begins on 93.3—ten a.m.”

That was the best part, when the nurse would drive in to fill up and vacuum out her car. Every Saturday morning at ten, he could count on it. First she would take out the floor mats, shake them out, and rub them on the grass. Then she would take everything out of the car and line it all up in neat, straight rows along the curb—a Georgia atlas and gazetteer, a pair of sneakers, a blue-and-white ice chest. She would open all the car doors and dig in a little red purse for the quarters. Then the roar of the vacuum would drown out the country music. Mel loved the graceful way she shook out the loops in the hose and stepped over it so carefully in her white shoes. She vacuumed around the doorframe, a place most people missed, and she always vacuumed the whole car on two quarters.