“Let ’em think that,” I told her. “They’ll be afraid to piss me off.” Which I think is why they don’t say boo when I’m around. It turns out that fake-dating Lexie felt a lot like the real thing, without all that boyfriend-girlfriend pressure.

As for Crawley, he did find himself another pair of dog walkers: Howie and Ira—who I think keep hoping another couple of granddaughters will turn up.

“You’ll like Howie,” I told Crawley. “He’s like a Rubik’s Cube with every side the same color.”

When they first showed up, Howie begins this discussion with Crawley about the dog’s names. “They’re named after the seven deadly sins and seven virtues,” Crawley tells him.

Howie considers this deeply, then says, “Why not the four freedoms?”

“That,” says Crawley, “would leave ten dogs unnamed.”

Howie raises his eyebrows. “Not if you named the rest after the Bill of Rights.”

Crawley goes red in the face with anger, Ira gets it on film, and their relationship is off to a flying start.

My father was too proud to call Crawley right away. He looked for work for about six weeks, then finally made the phone call and took a meeting with Old Man Crawley. He returned from Crawley’s in shell shock, but with a job. Well, more than just a job. The old hermit crab made my father a partner in his new restaurant. He let my dad turn it into whatever he wanted, and in true Crawley fashion, he threatened my father with everything short of eternal damnation if the restaurant ever failed. Dad, in his wisdom, decided to get Mom into it, too, turning it into a combination Italian-French place. They named it Paris, capisce? and so far, so good.

There are schwas drawn in the restaurant’s bathrooms that I didn’t put there.

In fact, there are schwas everywhere now. I got a call from Ira during spring break. He was on vacation in Hawaii, and he called to tell me he saw one scribbled across a DANGER, HOT LAVA sign. They’ve got them clear across the country—maybe clear around the world. There’s got to be hundreds of people doing it. No one knows who draws them, or why, but now they’re a they’re a permanent part of the landscape. Howie has a theory that involves aliens and cosmic string theory, but trust me, you don’t want to hear it.

The Schwa Was Here. Just a few of us know what it really means, and nobody believes me when I tell them that I started it. But that’s okay. I can handle being anonymous.

As for the Schwa himself, I never saw him again—but I did get a letter. It came in August, more than six months after he pulled his disappearing act.

Dear Antsy,