“‘And the Lord God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make an help meet for him. She shall be called Woman,’” says Big Jim. He stands there and stands there for so long that soon all Charlene can see are his new bleached-white teeth and his new white tennis shoes glowing in the dark.

In the morning Larry rides over on his riding mower and offers to cut her grass.

“I’ve got my own mower,” says Charlene. But Larry won’t go home. He makes himself comfortable on the seat of his lawn mower and goes on and on about Mars, how big and red it is.

“You know what?” he says, as if he’s just thought of it. “We ought to walk down to the lake yard one night and look at Mars, just you and me.”

“Thank you,” says Charlene, “but I can see Mars from my own backyard.”

After she saw that movie The Bridges of Madison County, Charlene used to think from time to time how nice it would be if a handsome stranger would come up in the yard one day, someone tall and distant, with a slow smile and a mysterious skill. But about the time that movie came out was when Charlene’s mother first started to wander off. If Clint Eastwood himself had pulled up in the backyard in a pickup truck, she couldn’t have driven off with him; her mother would have ended up at the bottom of Lake Despera.

Now her mother was dead and here were all these men, greasing up the old rusty gears of romance, wanting to move her furniture and show her Mars. But Charlene was not born yesterday. She knows she is the same little dumpy lady she was before her mother died and left her over $600,000. She knows all they want is to marry her so they can plop down on her new sofa and put their big white feet up on her coffee table and order off after that metal-flake bass boat and Evinrude motor they saw advertised on TV and put it on her debit card.

“Tell them all to get lost,” said Clarence down at the antique mall. “Tell them you don’t need a man, thank you very much. Tell him to crank up that riding mower and shove off, buddy.”

It was a drizzly Monday in early fall, and Charlene was out at Clarence’s Antique Mall sitting in one of the cozy little rooms Clarence had created out of used furniture—a camel-backed sofa, two wing chairs, a lamp with a fringed shade, a worn-out rug on the concrete floor. Clarence was glad to have her. “People have no vision,” he always said. “You have to show them everything. Just sit there. Look comfortable. You are demonstrating the purpose of furniture.”