Auntie had always “just made tea.” She brewed it from a mixture of miscellaneous herbaceous jetsam, some of which she grew and some of which she merely picked along the paths. She had been known, out walking, to make a slow, long bend to the ground to pluck out a nameless weed and pop it straight into her mouth. But drinking Auntie’s tea was simply the price one paid for her company.

“Thanks,” Peter said, “I’d be glad to take some.”

She was fussing with her glasses, picking out the right pair. She found them and slid them onto her weathered, nut-brown face—her head possessed a slightly shrunken appearance, as if the physical reductions of advanced age had moved from the top down—and located him with her eyes, smiling her toothless smile, as if then and only then had she become convinced that he was whom she believed him to be. She was clothed, as always, in a loose, scoop-necked frock of quilted fabrics, bits and pieces harvested from any number of other dresses over the years. What was left of her hair formed a vaporous tangle of white that seemed not so much to grow from her head as float in its vicinity, and her cheeks were sprayed by spots that were neither freckles nor moles but something in between.

“Come into the kitchen with you then.”

He followed her shuffling, barefooted progress down the narrow hallway to the rear of the house. The space was small, crowded by an oak table that left barely enough room to maneuver and oppressive with the heat of the stove and the steam that rose from a battered aluminum teapot resting atop it. Peter felt his pores opening with sweat. While Auntie went about her pouring, Peter raised the sash of the room’s lone window, allowing a breeze to trickle in, and took a chair. Auntie carried the pot to the table, where she placed it on an iron trivet; at the sink, she primed the pump and rinsed out a pair of mugs, which she brought to the table also.

“And to what do I owe this come-by, Peter?”

“I’m afraid I have some news. About Theo.”

But the old woman waved this away. “Oh,” she said, “I know all about that.”

Auntie sat across from him, straightening her dress on her bony shoulders as she stretched out her legs beneath her, and poured the tea into cups through a strainer. It had a thin, yellow color, like urine, and left behind in the strainer small, disturbingly biological bits of green and brown, like smashed insects.

“How it happen?”

Peter sighed. “It’s a long story.”

“I ain’t got nothing but time for stories, Peter. As long as you care to tell them, I got ears to hear by. Go on now, tea’s ready. No point letting it get cold.”