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“He’d already gone out, and she had the box behind the counter, out of sight.”
    His uncle nodded.
    “How’s Aunt Nettie?” Calvin asked. He trailed after his uncle into the kitchen, where he set his boxes and packages on the counter.
    He took a moment to answer. “She’s in some pain, even with the medication, which tires her out. There’s not much connecting her to the world that’s any good. She likes a can of Budweiser now and then, even though it’s against doctor’s orders, or at least the doctor over in the medical center in Bullhead. Doc Hoyle, the local man, he recommends it. But he’s a confirmed toper. Anyway, her mind drifts a little—downriver,” he said, not smiling now. “But maybe that’s for the best. Why don’t you go on out back and see what she’s up to? Don’t hesitate to make things clear to her. She wants a little encouraging sometimes.”
    Calvin went on alone in no real rush, through a den decorated with odds and ends from an Arab bazaar—draperies and cushions and stamped brass plates and a hookah the size of a potbellied stove. He wondered idly whether the decorations qualified as doodads or artifacts, and then he spotted a basket of woven reeds heaped with hundreds of coins about twice the size of silver dollars, each stamped on one side with the familiar equal-armed cross and on the other with the likeness of a stern-looking man that Calvincouldn’t identify. He quelled a sudden urge to pick up a big double handful of the coins and let them run through his fingers.
    He saw that his aunt was sitting outside in a webbed aluminum lawn chair under the big trees along the edge of the river. Her feet were ankle-deep in slack water that eddied slowly over a sandy bottom. A speedboat appeared on the sunlit far side of the river, coming down from the direction of Bullhead City. It was towing a skier, and as Calvin watched, the driver of the boat made a little whirly motion with his hand as a signal to the skier, and the boat U-turned and headed back upriver. Moments later, two figures floating on inner tubes bobbed past, also on the far shore, paddling with their hands to position themselves. They were quickly lost from sight, the river hurrying them along toward Needles. Then a fishing boat putt-putted into view, angling into a little bay half choked by willows. The lone occupant dropped an anchor over the side, picked up an already-rigged fishing pole, and tossed his lure into the water. The ceaselessly moving diorama reminded Calvin pleasantly of a Cascade beer lamp he had seen on the wall of a bar up in central Oregon, and he understood another piece of what it was that kept his aunt and uncle in this far-flung part of the world. His aunt seemed to be gazing out on the river as a person might gaze at the ocean or at a fire in a fireplace. Either that or she was asleep. He steeled himself for the meeting and went outside into the warmth of the evening.
    “Hello, Aunt Nettie!”
    She apparently wasn’t asleep, because she glanced up at him now with an interrupted sort of look, as if he were a door-to-door salesman. Then her expression changed to one of veiled recognition. “So you’ve come at last,” she said.
    “Yes, indeed,” he told her, trying not to read too much into her demeanor and tone. She was thinner than he remembered, and somehow it made her look taller. Her straight hair, still with streaks of black in it, was cut short, almost bobbed. In the past, though, she’d had a piercing gaze, but now it was dulled, and he wasn’t certain that she actually knew who he was at all. Maybe the “at last” business didn’t refer to him, but meant that she had been expecting the artifact. “I brought the veil,” he said.
    She looked downward and put her cupped hand over her eyes, as if to hide her sudden emotion, and then she clutched at his hand and held it, shaking her head. “God bless you,” she said. He hadn’t prepared himself for this—the change in her, even