“Gosh darn it. It’s going to be the work of a whole morning getting them out. We can’t leave them there. Houseguests!”

“Well, Wilfred saved you some time in the potato field,” I pointed out.

“Wilfred,” muttered Old Tom affectionately and, smiling to himself, went whistling out to catch Tag and Molly.

Sina and I sat and had a cup of tea. She got up to get the cookie jar, then put it back when she saw it was filled with nothing but the burnt cookies Gladys had made after the police returned her to our farm.

Now Gladys was gone for good. She had left the day before. I had come into Sina’s studio to tell her that Gladys was all packed up and ready for Sina to drive her to the ferry.

Sina sat enthralled listening to music, her hands unmoving on the clay.

“Where’s the music coming from?” I asked, looking around for the radio.

Sina nodded to a corner cabinet where a hand-cranked gramophone was perched. “Old Tom went into town and brought that home for me, as well as a few records.”

“Where’s the radio?” I asked.

“I gave it to Gladys. A good-bye present. I decided I didn’t want the chatter, only the music,” said Sina.

“Speaking of Gladys, I think she’s ready to leave,” I said.

“Shhh.” Sina quieted me because the Divertimento had reached the Andante.

We listened to the end and then Sina lifted the needle off the record.

“Mozart, he did it. He made it visible,” said Sina.

“You mean audible,” I said.

“Audible, visible, tangible,” said Sina.

“Why can’t we?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” said Sina. “There’s that little hiccup in time between the glimmer of sensing it and the realization of it. And in that hiccup is all the possibility. I begin to think, Franny, that it’s all there in the possibility, not in the realization. If we knew for a certainty of the existence of the UFO, the ghost, the mermaid, they would no longer excite us the same way; they would join electricity, airplanes, radio waves, babies being born, all of it taken for granted because it’s realized. It’s that intangible indefinable thing; that’s what keeps us coming back. It reminds us there’s something even more wonderful that can’t be realized. It’s what people are always trying to touch. It’s what Gladys is looking for in her bebop and in her cooking. What Miss Macy searches for on her endless long hikes. That I long for in my sculpture, you in your writing, Tom in his garden, Flying Bob on his planes.”

“Hey!” shouted Gladys from the truck. “I can’t sit here all day.”