But Chatty just passes a bowl of bitter scrotilized olives. “When I get out of here, Edward wants me to visit,” she says. “He’s fixing up his house, and I’m afraid he will want me to help. He’ll open a section of Sheetrock—there’ll be clouds of bees and rotting honey. I call his house The Hive. I told him to hire help, but the local help is Lawrence Home Improvement—Larry and his scrap-hoarding teenaged son. Larry’s motto is: Pound to Fit, Paint to Match.”

“But you’re good at all that,” I tell her. “You know what goes with what.”

“It’s hopeless,” Chatty says. “I’ll say, Paint this trim lobster bisque, and I come back and they’ve made it terra-cotta”

Which brings me back to the question, How does she come by such certainty? How does anyone? My mother, believing she could give away my dog—and she could!

And what about the certainty I feel regarding you? You could say that an hour is not a lot to go on. But always, before, a thing didn’t work because I was too young and too old. Too dumb and too smart. But I learn from my mistakes. The certainty I feel—it is something to hit back with. So in a manner of speaking, I now have a stick that is bigger than the stick I was beaten with.

Except let’s not think of it as something larger of the same type. Maybe, instead of a stick, it just looks like a stick. Maybe it is really a snake. And it moves like a river. Maybe it is a river, and we can go someplace on it, someplace new.

“You still writing that letter?” Chatty says.

* * *

Warren: Why do dogs roll in dead animals? (Because live ones won’t let them.)

Warren caught sight of a mouse in Little Egypt. He traced its path back to a nest of Raisinettes, the chocolate gone chalky in the dust beneath the couch. He told us he had caught mice as a boy, that once he skinned a trap-killed mouse and made a mouse-skin rug for his sister’s dollhouse. And then he was telling us again about Elmer, about Elmer his little spider monkey, climbing to the top of their Christmas tree, pelting the family with ornaments he had pulled from their places on the branches.

“We yelled at him to stop,” Warren said, “and Elmer threw them harder.”

That was Elmer’s last Christmas, Warren told us. Elmer caught cold on New Year’s Eve. He died in Warren’s arms in the car Mrs. Moore drove along icy streets to the vet. Is there an animal story that doesn’t end in tears? This one. Warren said the family gathered to bury Elmer in the backyard. “The dogs came, too,” Warren said. “They stood with us at the edge of Elmer’s grave, and kicked in some of the dug-out dirt. They couldn’t wait to see that sucker in the ground.”

Chatty has been having her insights again. A fall from a horse, a blow to her head some twenty years ago, left her able to approach a stranger in the park and say, I’m sorry about your husband. How did you know? the woman would then say to Chatty.