For a moment, Beatrice did not respond. Then she said, “He looks like Boyd.”

“A little,” Eleanor said. “A little.” Then: “Let’s go have some pancakes.”

“With syrup?” the old woman asked eagerly.

“With syrup,” Eleanor told her.

At home, the old woman’s energy faded quickly and she became irritable. She spat the pancakes from her mouth, saying they had no taste to them. Refused her cup of coffee, made with two teaspoons of sugar as she liked it. Talked in her rambling way about men being in the house and about the boy who had come to take Boyd’s place. Said to Eleanor that she knew the boy had been in her bedroom during the night. Could hear them, she vowed. Said Eleanor had brought shame to the house.

Eleanor did not argue with her. She listened, talked calmly, trying to tie the fragments of the old woman’s thinking together.

Yes, she said, there had been men in the house. Taylor Bowers, who ran the store where they shopped, and Noah Locke, the young man she had confused with Boyd. They had had supper and had left. And, no, the young man had not been in her bedroom. Nor Taylor. No man had ever been in her bedroom except Boyd.

Finally, the old woman gave way to sleep, sitting in her rocking chair on cushions Eleanor had made for her. Her head drooped to one side, her hands positioned in her lap, palms up. Eleanor draped a blanket over the old woman’s legs to keep them warm and fastened the belt around her waist and the chair slats to keep her from tumbling out of the chair.

She took the milk pail and went to the barn and milked the cow and then returned to the house and poured a cup of coffee and carried it to the porch and sat in the swing. It was early morning and she was already exhausted from her worrisome search for her grandmother-in-law. A mix of anger and pity stirred in her. She closed her eyes and pictured the old woman strapped to her chair, her hands in her lap, palms up, like the photographs of Gypsy beggars in magazines, and the image made her think of Noah Locke, of his wandering-about life. Like Gypsies.

She reached behind her head to pull free the clasp that held her hair, letting her hair fall around her shoulders. Combed it loose with her fingers. Felt suddenly free, like the Gypsies had seemed to be on their annual trips through the region, coming over the twisting mountain road from the small town of Helen to Hiawassee, traveling in a caravan of large wagons painted in vivid colors, stopping to camp beside the river not far from the home of her parents. The Gypsies were people from a storybook, the way they dressed and the way they sounded. Dark, flashing eyes, the eyes of people from India. Her father had warned her about them, warned they might take her captive and drive off with her and then, in some faraway place, they would sell her as quickly as they would sell a chicken. She had watched them from a safe distance as they made their camps and cooked their spice-rich meals and made music and laughter. And then they would be gone as mysteriously as they had arrived, with only the wide wheels of their wagons and the watered-down ash of their campfires holding any evidence that they had been present.