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“Shaving.”
    She made a disbelieving face. “You cut yourself shaving?”
    I pulled out my handkerchief and wiped the blood off my cheek. “So who’s your real father?” I said, changing the subject.
    “I don’t know.” She shrugged. “We never met him.”
    “We who?”
    “Isabelle and me.”
    I knelt down. “Your twin sister who lives in the attic?”
    She nodded. “Our daddy was a bad man.”
    “What’s his name?”
    She shrugged.
    “So you don’t know anything about him?”
    “Mommy says he was a real bad man.”
    “Was?”
    “He’s gone.”
    “That’s it? That’s all you know?”
    “He was a real bad man,” she whispered, eyes narrowing. “Evil.”
    “What did he do that was so evil?”
    Olive shrugged. “I don’t know. He disappeared.”
    “He ran off?”
    “No,” she said impatiently. “He disappeared.”
    “Oh,” I said uneasily.
    “Just like the others.”
    “What others?”
    She shrugged noncommittally. “My step-daddy taught me how to whistle. Want to see?” She blew a thin, amateurish whistle.
    “Wow. Impressive.” I put the ashes back on the closet shelf and tried to arrange the tin box the way I’d found it. The widow would be coming home soon.
    Now Olive eyed me curiously. “You weren’t really in the army.”
    “No,” I admitted with a shake of my head. “Not really.”
    She looked at me for a long time. “You say things to make people feel calm and trusting, but you lie.”
    I studied her a moment. Then I shrugged. “I wouldn’t call it lying, exactly.”
    “What would you call it?”
    I smiled. “Maybe I live in a different world than everybody else?”
    She nodded smugly. “We live in a different world, too.”
    “We who?”
    “Isabelle and me.”
    Just then, Delilah’s car pulled into the driveway.
    *
    That afternoon, I found the widow outside in the yard pruning her rose bushes. She wore a pair of gardening gloves and looked as if she’d been crying. Her face was red and splotchy, and her eyes were hidden behind a pair of dark sunglasses.
    “Listen,” I said. “Whatever happened to the kids’ father?”
    She looked startled her out of her reverie. “He died in the war,” she said, clearing her throat like an engine revving. “I thought I mentioned that already?”
    “So Andy and Olive’s father died in the war?”
    “Yes.”
    “Hm. Interesting.”
    “What do you mean—interesting?”
    “Olive told me he wasn’t her real father.”
    She held her breath.
    “Who’s their real father?”
    She didn’t answer me right away. Instead, she clipped a rose with the gardening shears. Snap.
    “Look, it’s a new decade. Most folks don’t judge people like they used to.”
    She lowered the shears. “He was nobody. A jerk.”
    “Olive said he was evil.”
    She dropped the gardening shears and took off her sunglasses. “Olive told you all this?”
    I nodded.
    She seemed disheartened. Then worried. Then pissed off. “Olive’s father was into drugs. He had a bad temper. He was kind of a shithead. He used to hit me. He left me when the girls were little.”
    “Girls? Plural?”
    She sighed deeply. She pulled off the gardening gloves one at a time and rubbed the bridge of her nose. “Olive has an identical twin sister who almost died at birth. The doctors put her on life support… and now she’s… institutionalized.”
    I nodded slowly, absorbing this new falsehood. “And what happened to the girls’ father?”
    “He went away.”
    “Where’d he go?”
    “I have no idea.”
    “You don’t want to track him down? Make him pay child support?”
    “It wouldn’t do any good,” she said dejectedly.
    “And where is Olive’s sister now?”
    She looked up at the sunlight spilling over everything. “You’re a good man, right?” She turned to me with feverish eyes. “I can feel it. You’ve been in the war, so you know about pain and suffering. You understand loss. I can trust you, can’t I, Clarence? Because I need to share this