Scrunching his eyes up, he let out his high-pitched laugh, and raised his hands as if to remove hers, but didn’t touch her. Wouldn’t touch her. Earlier she had taken his hand to help him up a steep path and had kept hold of it—an impulse that was slightly cruel because she could feel how uncomfortable he was. She wondered if he had ever held a girl’s hand.

She let him go, and as they walked on, she said, “Well, I did things too.”

“Not like the things I did.”

“Worse,” she insisted. “Ten times worse.”

“The things you did,” he said. “I did those things just to warm up to the things I did.”

“I did every bad thing in the world,” she said.

“I know that,” he said, sighing. “I knew you would when I made you.” He couldn’t stop himself from smiling.

She hit his arm. “Oh, you’re so pleased with yourself, aren’t you?”

They entered town. As they passed the Franklin Hotel, Annie asked Raj to wait and ran up to see the five old men playing poker on the porch. As a little girl she had often sat in the laps of one or other of these men, helping them play their hands: Malachy, with tobacco stains streaking his long white beard; Vernon, who had a metal pincer for a left hand and part of his right missing also; huge Lester, who looked as if he had been cut from a block of pink granite; Mo, all the veins broken in his cheek, his nose like a piece of coral; and poor Zippy, whose mind was slipping away. He used to tell outrageous hunting stories in his thick back-hills accent. Now, like a human geyser, the pressure would build, and after a while he would shoot to his feet, his whole body trembling, as if he were being filled with the Word of God. Sometimes he would explode into rambling nonsense; other times nothing would come and all the old hands would reach up and gently draw him back down. She loved these men, these exposed roots, the smell of them, the dead flesh of their hands. It gave her a feeling of enormous comfort that they were always here. Rounding them like bases, she gave each one a quick kiss on the cheek and returned to Raj.

They cut down Lincoln. Annie tried to hurry Raj past the old sisters’ dilapidated Victorian at the corner, and she thought they had made it until a shrill voice called, “Sebastiana.”

“Oh, no,” Annie said to Raj under her breath as Pela appeared before them, a tiny old woman in a flower-print babushka who looked, as she approached, as if she were trying to figure out which one of their eyes she was going to pluck out first.