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This was a rear window, ground-floor level, and filmed with dust, facing the back of a shabby brick building hung with peeling wooden porches. Beneath the porches was a row of trash cans and empty milk crates, and in front of those, so motionless that it took me a second to realize, stood Dorothy.

She was some twenty feet distant from me, on the far side of the alley, and I couldn’t tell if she saw me. She was looking toward my window, though. Her arms hung empty at her sides, and she wasn’t wearing her satchel. This gave her the air of someone who didn’t know what to do with herself. She seemed lost, almost. She seemed uncertain where to go next.

I scrambled to my feet, but before I could get the window open she turned and wandered away.

8

One night I woke up and heard low murmurs from Nandina’s bedroom. And one morning a few days later, when I was shaving in the bathroom, I chanced to look out the window and see Gil Bryan walking from the house toward the street, climbing into his pickup and starting it and quietly rolling away.

Oh, I was cramping their style, all right. It was time I moved back home.

Work was still going on there, as both Nandina and Gil pointed out when I mentioned my plans that evening. But really I could have returned several weeks ago, if I didn’t mind having the men overlap me a bit in the mornings. When I said as much to Nandina and Gil, they said, “Oh. Well …,” and, “If you’re sure, then …,” and both of them looked relieved. I started packing right after supper. I moved the next afternoon, a Friday, taking off early from the office.

The main part of my house was bare and shiny and echoing, as pristine as an empty dollhouse. But stray furniture and packed cartons filled every inch of my bedroom, so I settled in the guest room, which was small enough to have escaped being used for storage. I was glad to have an excuse not to return to my own bed. I think I was afraid it would bring back too many memories — not from the days of my marriage but from those weeks after the oak tree fell, when I’d lain there alone night after night wondering how to go on.

It wasn’t only for Gil and Nandina’s sake that I moved back when I did. Let’s be honest. The other reason, the main reason, was that I was hoping I would see Dorothy there. In the two weeks since her appearance outside my office window, there had been no sign of her, not a glimmer. I had looked for her in vain on the sidewalks and in crowds and wherever anonymous strangers waited in line. I had spun around without warning as I stood at intersections, hoping to surprise her behind me. I had settled conspicuously on public benches and strained to feel her sleeve brushing my sleeve. Nothing. She was avoiding me.

At home, I focused on the places where she had shown up before: the street and the backyard. On Saturday I got up when it was barely light out, and after a makeshift breakfast — two granola bars from a carton of foodstuffs in the bedroom — I took a stroll around the block, pegging my cane against the sidewalk almost soundlessly so as not to wake the neighbors. All I saw was one black cat, an insultingly paranoid type who shrank off as I drew near. The solitude made me feel too tall. I was glad to get back to the house.

Once the sun was fully up, I dragged a wrought-iron chair from the front yard to the rear. I set it on the back stoop and sat down, facing outward. My God, the lawn was a wreck. We’d had a dry summer, and the grass was more like straw. The azaleas looked stunted and wizened, and the wood-chip circle where the oak tree once stood had sunk in a good foot or more.

I was probably out of my mind to imagine that Dorothy would come here. The backyard was so bald. It lacked camouflage. There weren’t enough dapplings of shadow to break up the flat glare of the sun.

I rose, eventually, and went into the house for my keys and drove to the grocery store, where I gathered a large amount of provisions. You’d have thought I was shopping for a family of ten. (I think I had it in mind to hole up, to wait it out in my cave until Dorothy chose to show herself, however long it might take.) Back home I dug a few kitchen utensils out of the bedroom cartons and I fixed myself a conscientiously balanced lunch — protein, starch, green vegetable — after which I went out and sat in the wrought-iron chair again, for lack of anything better to do. A few minutes of this and I rose to uncoil the garden hose. The grass made a bristly sound under my feet. I placed the sprinkler near the azaleas and turned the faucet on full-blast and sat back down. And that was how I discovered the pleasures of watching a lawn being watered.

I swear that I could feel the grass’s gratitude. The birds seemed grateful, too. A little crowd of them came out of nowhere, as if word had gotten around somehow, and they twittered and chirped and fluttered in the droplets. My chair was too right-angled, forcing me to sit unnaturally erect, and its scrolls and curlicues dug into the knobs of my spine, but even so I felt the most pervasive sense of peace. I tilted my face up and squinted against the sunlight to follow the arc of the spray, which sashayed left, sashayed right, like a young girl swishing her skirts as she walked.

I practically drowned that yard.

Not till early evening, when the gnats started biting, did I turn off the hose. Then I went inside to fix dinner, and after that I tried to read a while in the impractical little slipper chair in one corner of the guest room. But I was so unaccountably, irresistibly sleepy that I laid aside my book fairly soon and went to bed. I slept without so much as a twitch, I believe, until nearly nine the next morning.

The early part of Sunday I spent dragging various cartons from the bedroom to the kitchen, replacing pots and dishes and foods in the cabinets that smelled of fresh paint. I enjoyed establishing just the right locations for things. I never could have done that in the old days — at least not with any hope that they would stay there, not with Dorothy around.

When I caught myself thinking this, I averted my head sharply, as if I could shake the thought away.

Once I’d unpacked what I could, I went out back again, like some kind of sports fan desperate to return to his game. The grass was still a yellowish white, although it no longer crunched. I moved the sprinkler over by the euonymus alongside the alley, sinking into the sodden earth with every step, and I turned the water on and settled back into my chair.

I had learned by now that when the sunlight hit the spray in a certain way I could occasionally, almost, see things. I mean things that weren’t really there. Not Dorothy, unfortunately. But one time I saw this sort of column, an ornate Corinthian column rising up and sprouting apart at the top and then dissolving into particles, and another time a woman in a long beige dress with a bustle. And yet another time — this was the weirdest — I saw an entire swing set, and a man in shirtsleeves was pushing a small child in one of those chair-like swings intended for infants and toddlers. I also saw a good many rainbows, needless to say, and numerous sheets of changeable taffeta unfurling and spreading themselves across the lawn.

But never Dorothy.

I saw a woman with an umbrella but — hey! — she was real. She was Mimi King, hovering by the euonymus bushes and shifting from foot to foot like a girl preparing to enter the arc of a jump rope, until finally she plunged into the spray and emerged on the other side of it, shaking out her umbrella before she collapsed it. “Well, hi there, Aaron!” she called, and she squished toward me in her Sunday heels, no doubt digging little tent-peg holes as she came. When she reached me, I stood up and said, “Good morning, Mimi.”