“I know you from somewhere,” said the nurse.

“Favorite Song,” he wrote in his notebook, “Lonesome Without You.’”

On a Saturday in early March the nurse was almost ten minutes late. She filled up with gas, 14.54 gallons, but on this day she didn’t vacuum out the car.

“Dying is hard work,” she said. “I am exhausted.” She lay down on the bench of the picnic table and scratched around in her hair with all her fingers.

Nancy brushed off her hands and rooted around in the bottom of her pocketbook for quarters. “Mel, go get us a Cocola, we could all use a break.”

When he got back, they were sitting across from each other with their elbows on the table talking about colors. “Sometimes when I’m this tired, I close my eyes and I just see blue,” said the nurse. She closed her eyes. “It looks like I’m on a Caribbean cruise.” Her mouth took on a different look, like a sleeping baby’s mouth, as if with her eyes closed, it didn’t know what it was doing. Mel stared at her, memorizing little things he would write down later, how her eyelashes lay against her cheek, how a piece of hair curled in front of her ear.

“Nothing but sky and water,” she said, “and it’s all my favorite color—blue.” Over by the ice machine a woman scratched off a lottery ticket. A jaybird lit in the chased tree. This is important, thought Mel.

“Rabbit manure is the best fertilizer in the world,” said his grandmother. She was raking around under the rabbit hutch while Mel tacked wire on a new pen. His grandmother was always trying to teach him that life is a cycle, that nothing ever really ends, that it all just goes around and around and around—and rabbit manure was the proof of it.

“After we get these rabbits in the freezer,” she said, “we’ll take this rabbit manure, spread it around the rosebush, and step back! That rosebush will jump up out of the ground. Life just takes on a new form.”

Mel saw this as an opportunity. “What’s a red rose that blooms in December?”

“Louis Philippe,” said his grandmother. “Now why in the world do you want to know a thing like that?”

“Somebody at the Citgo wants to know.”

“Citgo? Citgo? Have you been loitering down there at that Citgo?”

On the next Saturday morning as Mel sat at the picnic table with his notebook watching Nancy prune the chased tree, his grandmother pulled up by the gas pump. She sat in the car for a long time, looking around like a private eye. Then she got out.

“Is this boy bothering you?” she asked Nancy. “Is he making you nervous with all that loitering? Look on the door,” she said to Mel, and she read out loud, “No Loitering.”