I had no idea what the Schwa had in mind, but I didn’t like his eerily calm tone of voice. It haunted me all the way home. It was what you might call a “blaze of glory” calm. I started to think of that old cartoon where Daffy Duck gets no respect, so, to prove he’s a better act than Bugs Bunny, he swallows a few sticks of dynamite, guzzles a can of gasoline, and then swallows a lighted match.

“Yeah,” he says as he floats up toward the pearly gates, “but I can only do it once.”

I conferred with Howie and Ira about it, because I felt I had no one else to talk to.

“Maybe he’ll paint himself green and run through the school,” says Ira.

“Naked!” says Howie.

“Naah,” I said. “If the cat suit and the orange sombrero didn’t get him noticed, no amount of green paint would.”

“Maybe he’s gonna skydive right into the middle of a Jets game,” says Ira.

“Naked!” says Howie.

“Naah,” I said. “People might remember that it happened, but they wouldn’t remember it was him.”

They were no help, and so, for the Schwa’s sake, I put aside my own feelings of awkwardness and brought my worries to Lexie, because I knew, in spite of everything, she cared about him as much as I did.

It seemed a kind of poetic justice, or maybe just pathetic justice, that Lexie’s and my relationship now revolved entirely around the Schwa.

“He won’t disappear,” Lexie said, after I told her the story about his mother. “He won’t because she didn’t.”

“How do you know?”

“Because people just don’t pop out of existence.”

“Maybe they do,” I said. “Maybe they do all the time, and no one notices.”

That’s when Crawley rolled into the room. “You’re talking about our friend Mr. Schwa, aren’t you.”

“Since when was the Schwa your friend?” I asked.

“I was speaking figuratively.”

“You should be an expert on being invisible, Grandpa,” Lexie said, a little more biting than she usually was. “With all the years you’ve been cooped up in here.”

Since nasty looks didn’t work on Lexie, he gave me one instead.

“Out of sight, but not out of mind.” He wheeled over to the window. I had opened one of the curtains to let some late afternoon light in, but now he tugged the curtain closed, then turned to me. “How many years have you been hearing stories about crazy Old Man Crawley?”

“For as long as I can remember,” I said. “And then some.”

“There, you see? There’s a difference between being invisible, and being unseen. No one passes this restaurant without looking at these windows and wondering about me.”

“So what do you think about the Schwa’s mother?” I asked him. “Which is she, invisible or unseen?”