My aunt’s appearance came just a few weeks thereafter. I had been reading William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner that summer, my pencil periodically underlining or making a checkmark or scribbling, almost unconsciously, some note in the margins, Styron’s prose so enrapturing that I almost did not even look up when I heard the car roll to a stop beside the pumps.

The truth was that I had more or less forgotten that I had any relations left in the area apart from my grandmother, and so when I saw the woman through the open window of the car I did not, at first, realize who she was. We chatted briefly as I began the process of filling the tank of her Pontiac. She was perhaps a decade younger than my grandmother—mid-sixties, if my guess was right—and seemed, even via my limited view through the window, to be more fashionably arrayed than I might have expected given the town’s size and relative isolation. Her hair was covered by a thin veil of light blue and her eyes were hidden behind sunglasses that in those days still seemed exotic. Indeed, had it not been for the modest automobile I might have wondered if I was indeed catching sight of some film star of another era swung off the freeway for a tank of gasoline, an idea that seemed bolstered by her very familiarity. But then I realized that my memory of that face came not from the silver screen but from my own childhood, and before I could stop myself, I said the name by which I remembered her: “Aunt Evelyn?”

I had finished refilling the Pontiac and stood by the window now. Her face was tilted toward me, those great sunglasses vaguely insectoid. “You must have me confused with someone else,” she said simply.

I might have excused myself then, getting her change from inside and letting her drive off and returning to my book, but for some reason I told her my name and then my grandmother’s name.

“Oh my,” she said. “You’re Cousin Jenny’s grandson?”

I nodded as she removed her sunglasses. The face behind them was older than my memory but just as strikingly beautiful: thin and finely featured, her nose aquiline and her eyes light blue as if lurking in her genealogy was some distant ­Scandinavian ancestry.

She asked if my parents had moved back to the area and when I told her they had not she seemed somehow relieved. “You’re staying where?”

“At my grandmother’s,” I told her.

“Ah,” she said. “Well, nice to see you. Let’s have you and your grandmother over sometime.”

“Great,” I said, unhappy now that I had identified myself at all, for I had no interest in such a visit.