My father went away. I could feel my mother’s mood lift, could feel her pride at what I had done. She swept and mopped until the fish and its water were gone. She gave me cookies with frenzied cheer. But I would not take her warmth toward me; I was not too young to do evil, to kill, to cause great pain. The knowledge of my own evil and cowardice has never left me, it is with me even now, clear as the bowl and the water.

The day is dead. One of my four friends, with whom I had a standing coffee date each third Monday of the month, is moving west to another county. Mr. Geddoes, my Fuller Brush man, was promoted to a more prestigious and profitable sales route. He came to my door today with the last order he’ll ever deliver to me. My brooms and disinfectant will soon be delivered by some probably pink-cheeked local with ambitions to a district manager title.

Mr. Geddoes is Australian, a dried and withered man. He could make any cleaning product sound colorful and enticing: boxes of bug powder, tins of floor polish, toilet fresheners. But his sales depended on the compassion inspired by the sight of his emaciated frame keeling at a forty-five-degree angle in the effort to balance his enormous load. He used to say that if he ever gained ten pounds his business would be ruined. But there was no danger of that. The more he sold, the more he had to carry as he went about his deliveries; and the more he carried, the more guilty his customers felt.

I brought him in the first day he came. It was hot that day, and the wraith in the black suit at my door seemed so indifferent to the weight of his load that I was immediately convinced that he was laboring beneath some more personal burden. So I took him into my cool kitchen and told him I would never buy anything unless he accepted an iced coffee. He showed me the colorful catalogs, opened his strange sample case with its inexhaustible oddities.