But Granddaddy’s ghost had vanished; he’d heard Dottie calling from the bottom of the attic stairs. Not even death had saved the infant emeritus from his fear of Dottie and her Seeing Eye dog harness.

“You’re going to need your toolbox!” I was calling to Dottie. I could hear her clomping up the attic stairs.

“I could tell by all the caterwaulin’—I know a toolbox situation when I hear one, Adam,” Dottie was saying.

“Dottie will help you,” I said to Sally. “Dottie isn’t a ghost.” The way she was wedged in the shower made me reconsider Sally’s agility.

“You’ve seen too much of me, Adam,” Sally moaned. “When you think of me, you’ll remember me this way,” she added. I knew it was true; I couldn’t refute it, then or now.

“Holy shit,” Dottie said, when she saw what the toolbox situation entailed. “You get out of here, Adam—go talk to your grandmother, or somethin’,” Dottie told me. “Don’t you worry, sweetheart,” Dottie said to Sally. “This stupid shower wasn’t built for a full-size person, but there ain’t a door I can’t get off,” Dottie said. I put on my clothes and left the two of them, with Dottie at work removing the hinges to the shower door.

“My nipple got burned by the hot water—just one of them,” I could hear Sally telling Dottie, as I went down the attic stairs.

“Don’t you worry, sweetheart,” I heard Dottie say. “I know what works for a scalded nipple—I just gotta get this fuckin’ door off first.”

I helped my grandmother in the kitchen and the dining room while Dottie was attending to Sally. I was surprised how relieved Nana was to hear what had happened to poor Sally. I felt awful about Sally’s humiliation in the shower, and her scalded nipple. Not knowing, at the time, about Nana’s conversation with Dottie, I was unaware that my grandmother had imagined far worse. Now, in retrospect, I’m not at all sure that Sally’s loss of her virginity would have been worse.

“I saw me in your eyes—what you were thinking,” was all Sally would say to me about it, ever. I knew, even before Dottie brought her downstairs to the dining room, that Sally and I were finished. Her blouse was a little too sheer to wear without a bra, but Sally sat through dinner while we listened to her underwear in the dryer. You couldn’t quite see her nipples through her blouse, but the Band-Aid covering the scalded nipple was very clear. Dottie wouldn’t tell me what Down East remedy for relief she’d put on the nipple, or on the Band-Aid. “Just a dab of somethin’,” was all Dottie would say. For a big girl, poor Sally didn’t eat much of Nana’s mystery casserole while we listened, interminably, to the clicking sound made by Sally’s bra in the dryer.

Mr. Barlow suggested I write about it. “Your first girlfriend, your first heartbreak, and hers—that’s a short story, Adam,” the little English teacher told me.