“To tell you the truth, I thought he’d been drinking. I meant to tell you about it, too.”

“He shouldn’t be drinking during the season, not on a weekday.”

“Oh, I don’t know what day it was. And the young people, you know. You all do what you please.”

Maybe this was a phantom, like her memory of meeting Mom. He shook his head, tried to forget it, but felt himself sinking again. She was talking about planting more roses now, as though she had already bought them and only had to dig holes in the ground. “This is the right time for planting,” she said. “They can root through the winter, you know. While the world is all cold and dead like.”

She sat quiet after that. Pretty soon her niece showed up—the one family member she had left, Miss Minette, who looked almost the same age as Miss Dee. She said hello to Ronny and he stood up so she could sit. “Oh, you don’t have to do that,” she said, all the while settling into the rocking chair, her girth filling the seat; she let out a heavy breath. “Lord, that walk gets to me anymore. I can’t get my breath like I used to.”

“It’s cause you’re so old,” said Miss Dee, and laughed.

He left them to talk and went upstairs to get ready for work. It had set his mind to racing, the thought that Ben might have talked to Miss Dee, might have walked by the house; but that made him feel desperate and stupid, and he tried to stop the whole chain of imaginings that followed. The idea preyed on him. But what did it matter? If he had visited Miss Dee, he hadn’t come upstairs to see whether Ronny was in his room; he hadn’t left a note; he hadn’t called, even though he had the number—even though he was the one who had given Ronny the money to put in the phone. For such a long time they had talked every day. That had been real, hadn’t it? What had happened between the two of them, that had been real? He hadn’t made it up. But here he was in the fall, listening to the echoes of the football game on the radio, Carolina leading Virginia, those boys playing hard today, the ones he had known in Ehringhaus, the ones he had written papers for, cheated for, watched, out of obsession—he felt sick to his stomach but nothing would come up. He stood at the bathroom sink and looked at himself, wondered what would become of him.

He went to work, pasted up the newspaper, did his job, played and joked with Fred, who spelled his name Phr3d; “Transcendental Pasteup,” they called themselves. Pages assembled while you wait. The work eased him and he forgot. But when he stepped into the room that night—the house quiet, Miss Dee’s room closed—it all came back to him, and he collapsed onto the bed, lay there until the sorrow welled up in him, took off his clothes, and slipped under the blankets, pulling them over his head, surrounding himself with the dark.