I am well. I work this tiny farm (imagine me, a farmer), growing hardly more than enough to keep ourselves, really. Ruth makes her living writing romance novels. We have a great time choosing people from this small town for her to transform into the heroes and heroines of these tawdry worlds. We select the most unlikely pairings of farmers, shopkeepers, and schoolteachers, enhancing their best physical features, filling them with fire, and flinging them together. When we pass one of our transformed characters in town, Ruth will—and she has a marvelous memory—relate one of their breathless love scenes. The town thinks us touched. We are always falling about with laughter.

I’m amazed you can stay in that house, Eggy, though perhaps it is smarter to live in Father’s cave than to run, like Rags and me. I once believed traveling would change me fundamentally, purify and rid me of him. I suppose I imagined I could just pluck him out and leave him on the peak of a mountain somewhere. Clearly I’m too weak, as Father always said. Or perhaps the truth is that no one can ever change: transformation is just a fantasy, like Ruth’s romances, invented, as God and heaven were, to make life bearable.

I should tell you—in part because of your request—that my old demon is still with me. The farm is quite a difficult place because there are so many ways here by which one can do oneself harm. So the voice, which has no problems transforming, is very active and opportunistic. Already it is imitating Ruth’s voice—the voice of this woman telling me lovingly, reasonably, to end myself. But there is something of the ghost about Ruth too, so I can fool myself that we are already gone, the two of us.

But to your request. I’m sorry about all this. It took me four days to muster the courage even to open your letter. Because of what you’re asking, I thought it best to give you a sense of things.

What a mess Gerry has put you in. I’ve talked to Ruth. We can’t possibly, of course, take the boy on a permanent basis. But to provide some relief, since it sounds as if Brenna is heading for a breakdown, we will take the boy—my nephew, I suppose—for the summer. St. Louis is the closest city. Our old car won’t make it that far, but this town has a train station—I enclose details—and I can pick you up there. Just let me know when.

Your loving brother,
Olly

PISGAH, MISSOURI
1954

SEBASTIANA CELLI—ANNIE—SAT ON THE COUNTER OF her father’s grocery store in a bright yellow housedress, idly flinging pieces of dried macaroni into her kicked-off pump. Her face was suggestive of an archaic beauty, that of Greece and Rome, and looked nearly grotesque on her stick-thin twelve-year-old body: those thick dark eyebrows, that patrician nose, lips too sensual for a child, and that absurd profusion of black curls, which she had, in a recent moment of impatience, snipped raggedly short.