When Rose thought back on it, she remembered seeing him several times before the night the island sank into the sea. He’d been roaming around on that island. He was a tall man with beautiful blond hair, just the most beautiful hair. It was long and full and he wore it back, tied at the back of his neck with a little black string. He always wore a velvet coat, just like Rose’s best velvet dress which had been in her suitcase. He had walked around the island looking at things. He wore shiny black boots, very smooth without buckles. Not cowboy boots. And whenever he happened to pass Rose, he smiled at her and he winked.

Rose hated Athens, Texas. But he took her there, though she could not clearly remember the trip. Just waking up in the Dallas airport with a nice lady to take care of her, and a porter collecting their bags. Uncle Lestan showed up the next night.

The old woman and the old man didn’t want her. They sat in a lawyer’s office on “the town square” at night, and the old man said that they didn’t have to make this appointment after dark, that he didn’t like to drive at night when he didn’t have to, that this was “disruptive” and he and his wife could have explained all this on the telephone. The old woman just shook her head as the old man explained: “We didn’t have anything to do with Morningstar, you see, what with the musicians and the drugs. We don’t know this child.”

The lawyers talked on and on, but Uncle Lestan became angry. “Look, I want to adopt her,” he said. “Make it happen!”

That was the first time Rose had ever heard someone say, “Make it happen.” And it was the first and last time she ever saw Uncle Lestan angry. He’d dropped his angry voice to a whisper but he’d made everybody in the room jump, especially Rose, and when he saw this, he took Rose in his arms and carried her outside the building, for a walk around the little town.

“I’ll always take care of you, Rose,” he said. “You’re my responsibility now and I’m glad of it. I want you to have everything, Rose, and I’ll see to it that you do. I don’t know what’s wrong with those people that they don’t love you. I love you.”

Rose went to live in Florida with Aunt Julie and Aunt Marge in a beautiful house blocks from the sea. The sand on the beach was as white and fine as sugar. Rose had her own room with flowered wallpaper and a canopy bed, and dolls and books that Uncle Lestan sent to her. Uncle Lestan wrote her letters in the most beautiful handwriting and black ink on pink paper.