“In those restaurants in New York, where they used to go together—that’s where Jasmine has seen him,” Nana told me.

“Jasmine said he’s usually with another dead person—so she sees other ghosts, ya know,” Dottie added.

“And this is what makes you think Jasmine might be ‘especially susceptible’ to seeing ghosts?” I asked my grandmother. Dottie just rolled her eyes. “Granddaddy’s ghost just talks about punctuation—he’s never scary,” I pointed out to them.

“It’s nothin’ special, I suppose—seein’ your dead husband, with a bunch of dead fellas ya used to know,” Dottie said, shrugging.

“Adam, dear,” Nana began, “I think Jasmine believes in eternity.” I had no idea why Jasmine’s belief in eternity—her own immortality, most of all—should concern me, but my grandmother had given more consideration to Jasmine’s spirituality than I had. “I don’t think a woman like Jasmine will necessarily find this kind of encounter with a ghost soothing, dear.”

“Soothin’!” Dottie exclaimed. “When she calls them ex-husbands and old boyfriends, she tells ’em how much sex she’s havin’ with you—ya know, Adam,” Dottie said.

“I know,” I said. We were aware of Jasmine’s voice growing louder in the living room.

“A woman as old as your mother, Adam, dear, should not see the deluded, departed infant man in the bedroom of a much younger man she’s sleeping with!” my grandmother declared. “This could cause Jasmine to become unhinged,” she added.

“If you ask me, Mrs. Brewster, Jasmine is unhinged,” Dottie said.

“I’m with a young guy right now, Harold—he wants it all the time!” we could hear Jasmine yelling from the living room.

“When you break up with her, dear, she’ll be calling you, you know,” Nana told me.

“I know,” I said.

“He never tells me he can only get it up with prostitutes, Harold!” Jasmine yelled.

“She’s unhinged, all right—her pussy can’t be so special to all them fellas,” Dottie told us.

“I know,” I said.

“You mouse-dick, Harold—you squirrel-dink!” Jasmine shouted. Nana and Dottie just looked at me.

“I know, I know,” I said.

“You hamster-penis, Harold!” Jasmine screamed. The sound of her hanging up the phone in the living room was very audible in the kitchen.

“A hamster is a new dick to me,” Dottie told us.

I was considering that the eternity Jasmine believed in was of the damnation kind. What I should have remembered was that Nana had long been a pillar of prescience. Hadn’t she predicted that someone would come to harm or be killed on the old croquet court? And while my grandmother didn’t exactly tell me about my mom and Molly, didn’t Nana (in her ambiguous way) imply to me that my mother wasn’t living the bachelorette life my aunts and I had once imagined? “You’re not only the first man in her life, dear; you’ll be the only one,” my grandmother had said. “You’re all that matters to her, Adam—as far as men are concerned,” she had told me. In her beat-around-the-bush fashion, hadn’t my grandmother told me my mom was a one-event girl—hadn’t Little Ray chosen the one and only time she would ever sleep with a man, strictly for the purpose of giving birth to me?