I had to shield my face from Jasmine’s flying hands. Her rings were cutting me, everywhere. There was a clunky, glitzy ring on each of her fingers—except the wedding one. “That woman’s hands were mostly diamonds, dear—big ones,” Nana told me later. (Sharp ones, I can attest.)

“Not Little Ray!” the enraged diaper man kept shouting. He didn’t need a lip-reader to be understood now. I saw he was the infant in extremis, the infant terribilis, the near-death diaper man—the scrawny lunatic emeritus, naked except for the diaper, clutching a fistful of croquet wickets in his wizened hands.

“Not Little Ray!” Jasmine was now wailing—she was doing her best to convince the ghost she was on his side.

“Not Little Ray!” they now screamed at each other. If my grandmother didn’t hear (and couldn’t see) Granddaddy Lew, she of course could hear Jasmine screaming the unmentionable.

“I got this, Mrs. Brewster!” I heard Dottie calling.

Our neighbors must have heard Jasmine screaming, “Not Little Ray!” The raving bed-wetter was now standing on my bed, where her soaked negligee clung to her. In truth, although Jasmine was slightly younger than Molly, she looked a lot older than the ski patroller in these circumstances.

“Little Ray is my mom,” I felt compelled to say, since Jasmine wouldn’t stop shrieking her name. For no known reason, what I said appeared to upset Jasmine more. At that moment, the diaper man stopped shouting. A passing semblance of sanity crossed his face. He squatted, grunting. Could ghosts crap? Did they? I’m done with generalizing. All I’ll say is that the diaper man appeared to be trying to fill his diaper. Not to be outdone, or having abandoned what remained of her reasoning, Jasmine—still standing on the bed—let her bowels go. Or she let go of both her bowels and her sanity, in no discernible order.

Yes, Jasmine shit in my bed. No, this never happened with another girlfriend—marriageable or unmarriageable. Such a spontaneous act of defecation defeated or outdid the diaper man. He disappeared, which ghosts can do as suddenly as they can show up.

“Look what you’ve done to me, Adam—just see what you’ve done,” Jasmine said. She knelt, beshitted, in my bed.

“Don’t you be goin’ up them attic stairs, Mrs. Brewster,” I heard Dottie saying. “I’m the fix-it person in this house, and this sure as shit sounds like a situation in need of fixin’ to me.”

“This is not the woman I am, Adam—this is entirely your doing,” Jasmine was telling me.

I foresaw what would become the theme of her unceasing phone calls. Jasmine would never completely recover her sense of herself. When a woman of a certain age—and, as Nana had noted, a presumed station in life—shits in bed, and all over herself, this can only be someone else’s doing.

When I heard the familiar creak on the attic stairs, I saw Jasmine flinch. She sprang to her feet, covered with shit, teetering on my bed in anticipation of the next ghostly visitation. All I had time to say was, “Don’t worry—it’s not a ghost.”