From the attic, I could only watch in horror Rose’s headfirst and rigidly supine descent of the stairs. Dottie was there—she was able to soften Rose’s fall at the foot of the stairs. Rose’s panties had been pulled down to her knees—step by step, an inch or two at a time, in the course of her harrowing descent. Commanded to get out of my bedroom in the agony of her muscle spasm, and being abruptly told there was a ghost, poor Rose had seen me at the top of the stairs. She not only knew I’d watched her fall; she saw the exact moment of my seeing her so crudely exposed.

You can’t control how you look when you see someone revealed that way. I can’t imagine the expression on my face, or how poor Rose would ever forget it. At that moment, my pity for her was apparent. As with Sally, it wasn’t a look I could take back.

In my boxers, I started down the stairs; Dottie stopped me before I got to the step that creaked. “Get dressed, Adam—then bring me this young lady’s clothes,” Dottie said. Rose had managed to pull her panties up, but she clung to Dottie, with her face turned away from me.

After Granddaddy’s death, when I was asked if my grandmother had a servant, I answered truthfully and without hesitation: “Not exactly.” During the diaper man’s decline, Dottie had taken charge of him. As my grandmother aged, I could foresee Dottie taking charge of her. Now, on the evening of Rose’s muscle spasm, Dottie certainly took charge of Rose. Dottie got Rose dressed for the dinner table. Dottie gathered Rose’s wits together for her.

At dinner, after my grandmother served the casserole, all eyes were on the recovered but clearly shaken Rose. “I don’t like to take the muscle relaxant, because it makes me sleepy,” Rose was telling us. “I take it at bedtime, so I don’t get a cramp in my sleep, but during the day—well, you know, I just take my chances.” She shrugged.

The shrug seemed to trigger the first twitch. Her fork, in her right hand, had been pushing the tuna casserole around, with no apparent purpose. When Rose’s right biceps contracted, her fork grazed her right cheek—it came close to poking her in the eye. An errant glob of tuna, pasta, and cheese sailed over Rose’s right shoulder. “Limping is safer for me than sitting, and lying down is when I get the worst ones,” Rose explained. She was doing her best to remain detached from her body’s behavior.

Her right knee suddenly struck the underside of the table, making our water glasses jump—the fork flew out of Rose’s right hand. “Or when I’m nervous, like when everyone is staring at me,” Rose blurted out. “Like when everyone is waiting for me to have a major muscle spasm, if I just twitch or something,” Rose said, twitching. It was hard to look at her, but it was harder not to.