“Right,” I answered her. She sat on the edge of the bed, slowly taking her clothes off. I didn’t watch her; I had my eye on that spot under the skylight where you-know-who had a habit of just appearing. When Rose and I were kneeling together on the bed, she was still taller than I was—even on her knees. When we were lying down and kissing, and feeling each other up, I truly thought Rose was the right girlfriend for me—certainly not because I pitied her.

I mistook the muscle spasm in Rose’s right calf for her first sighting of the infant emeritus. Rose emitted a bloodcurdling cry, worthy of a first-time ghost sighting. Her right foot flopped crazily all around, and Rose grabbed the back of her right thigh—then, suddenly, the right cheek of her buttocks. She’d not told me her muscle spasms had a ripple effect on the right side of her body; the ripples ran from her calf to her hamstring to her gluteus maximus. Rose had writhed off the bed and was propelling herself with her heels, on her back, across the bedroom floor. I was looking everywhere for the diaper man, but I couldn’t see him. I had no doubt that Rose must have seen him.

As with Sally, I would only belatedly learn the gist of what Dottie and my grandmother were saying in the kitchen, where Rose’s piercing screams had reached them. “Heaven have mercy—they can’t be having sex, can they?” Nana asked Dottie.

“That sure as shit don’t sound like sex to me, Mrs. Brewster—not in any of the usual positions I can think of,” Dottie answered her.

Maybe the faculty emeritus had been lurking in the open doorway of my attic bathroom, and Rose had seen his reflection in the skylight? Although I couldn’t see Granddaddy’s ghost, I didn’t hesitate to speak sharply to him. I never imagined that poor Rose would think I was speaking to her.

“Get out of my bedroom!” I said (I thought) to Granddaddy’s ghost, who (of course) wasn’t there. Nana and Dottie didn’t hear what I said—not over Rose’s heart-stopping scream, not as far away as the kitchen—but, from Rose’s heartrending expression, I had no doubt that Rose had heard me.

“No, not you—I meant the ghost!” I said to Rose, which my grandmother and Dottie also didn’t hear; Rose clearly did. The ghost word, and her perception that I was rejecting her, gave a new urgency to Rose’s backpedaling across my bedroom floor. She’d called her wonky right foot her accelerator foot—the stated reason Rose was not allowed to drive a car—but the way she propelled herself with both her heels, on her back, down the attic stairs, suggested to me another reason not to let Rose drive. In the middle of a muscle spasm, Rose’s capacity to accelerate in reverse would have been more hazardous (and frightening to behold) in a car.