It was Mr. Geddoes who introduced me to my toad last spring. When I asked him if he recognized the odd song that had been filling the garden in the morning he said, “That’s a toad, that is. And a big one.” He left his chair and went out into the garden, treading slowly, silently, listening. I followed. The song had bothered me. It had an eerie quality at first, when I didn’t know what it was. Mr. Geddoes pointed. “There he is, by the compost heap. An old fellow.” That’s when I first saw the sulfurous yellow toad, hunched on the stones around the heap, his gnarled flesh bunched around him and an incongruous trilling coming from his pale throat. Well, the toad remains, and Mr. Geddoes is gone. He’s moved over to the fancy housing development across the county line. Now the bright bottles and squat cans will have no more pleasant associations than the smells of the solutions they contain and their effect on my woodwork and tile. I am eaten by resentment, and whoever takes Mr. Geddoes’s place will get no welcome from me. He will have to take his orders on the front step like the milkman and the paperboy.

Weeks passed. A month, maybe. I didn’t go to Sam’s house. They wanted to be alone. I sometimes saw them from across a lawn at school, her long legs and her fringed leather tunic, Sam looking drab beside her in his robe. Angelina followed them everywhere. When she ran on the grass she wasn’t so ugly. They picked up their mail and then sat for hours in the coffee shop. I don’t think either of them went to class.

I was reading beneath the open skylight when I heard their feet on the stairs. Carlotta entered first, smiling, then Angelina, then Sam.

Carlotta stared around the room. She smelled good and the beads on her fringed tunic tinkled as she moved. Angelina’s nails scratched at the wood of the floor.

“Your room is so bare!” Carlotta exclaimed.

“Yes, I’m a monk, you know.”

Carlotta sat on the floor and threw an arm around the dog. Sam crouched next to her. He began immediately.

“We’ve bought a ten-dollar car for ten dollars. I don’t know what make it is because the chrome and the company name have all been ripped off. It’s got almost no paint left. I believe it’s a retired getaway car. But all I know for sure is that it gets about a mile and a half per gallon of gasoline and it won’t go over twenty-five miles an hour. It takes two people to drive it because the ignition wires are loose. I hold them up against the contact terminals while Carlotta drives.”

He paused, and Carlotta nudged him along. “And…?”