It was too small a shower stall for Sally. What was she thinking when she got in the shower in her underwear? In the first place, Sally never meant to turn the water on; she wasn’t trying to take a shower. Sally was trying to get away from the ghost. She sized up the shower as entirely too small for the ghost to get in with her.

Sally’s nonstop screaming had started a debate between my grandmother and Dottie in the kitchen, two floors below.

“I hope that’s not a loss-of-virginity scream—that girl is much too young,” Nana had said. (Dottie would tell me—not then, but later—how she’d answered my grandmother.)

“That sure as shit sounds like too much caterwaulin’, and the wrong kind of caterwaulin’, for a loss of virginity to me, Mrs. Brewster,” Dottie told my grandmother. Sally’s prolonged screaming had sounded like “a toolbox situation” to Dottie, who was prescient enough to have brought her toolbox, when she called up to me from the bottom of the attic stairs. “Is there somethin’ or someone in need of fixin’, Adam?” Dottie called.

By then, the situation in the shower stall had worsened. Poor, overweight Sally had slipped and fallen; before she fell, she’d inadvertently turned on the shower. The cold water must have surprised her; then the hot water had scalded her. She’d contorted herself to get away from the stream. She lay wedged against the door—I couldn’t open the door because she was pressed against it. Her bra and panties were thoroughly soaked, and thoroughly transparent. “Don’t look at me, Adam!” Sally wailed. “Don’t let the ghost get in here!” she cried.

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.