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though Uncle Lymon’s letter had warned him. Half of what she had been had disappeared, and he looked out at the river for a moment to try to come to terms with it, which he couldn’t do. “You’ve come to
stay
this time.” Her eyes rolled back into her head disconcertingly, as if she were literally searching her mind. “It’s coming to pass,” she said.
    “Sure,” he muttered stupidly. “But it was no problem, really. There was a little mix-up out at Shirley Fowler’s store, but we got it settled. Shirley sends her regards.”
    “Shirley?” his aunt asked, recovering herself abruptly and giving him a doubtful look.
    “Shirley Fowler, out on the highway—at the Gas’n’Go. She said her husband used to be a Knight. I didn’t catch his name.”
    There was no sign that she understood him. “And you?” she asked.
    “I’m doing pretty well,” he said. “Better than I deserve. How are you feeling?”
    “Are you a
Knight?”
    He smiled widely to deflect the baffling question, wondering again if she knew who he was after all, or whether she was speaking metaphorically somehow. “I … No, not really. I haven’t really thought much about it. I’ve been pretty busy.”
    “The world is too busy for its own good,” she said softly. “I see a Knight in you.” And then, looking off into the distance, she said, “Shirley Fowler had a store out on 1-40. She’s a local girl, from out in Essex. How’s Leonard?”
    “Leonard?”
    “Shirley’s husband. Leonard Fowler.”
    Dead,
he thought, but he didn’t say it. “He wasn’t there, actually. I didn’t speak to him.”
    She nodded. “He hasn’t been out here for a good long time. Probably he’s passed away, like most of the rest of them.”
    “I brought you a little something,” he told her cheerfully, and he handed her the paper sack, which she took from him while looking deeply into his eyes. “Go ahead and open it. It’s not Aunt Iris. …” he said, regretting both the comment and the coasters even as he said it. She hauled the plastic toilet out of the bag and took a good look at it, apparently trying to make sense of it. “I mean to say that it’s not the
veil
,” he said. “It’s a … knickknack. From Las Vegas.” There was a time when she would have laughed at it, but now she gave him a puzzled look, lifted off the top toilet seat, and peered at the legend inscribed on it. After a moment she laid the lid back on top of the others, put the whole thing back into the bag, and set it down under the chair. River water immediately began to swirl it away. “I’ll just put it inside the house,” Calvin said, snatching it up again. “I hear the sounds of supper. Can I bring you anything? Can of Budweiser?”
    “They say it’s the king of beers,” she said, but she was gazing out over the river again. The fisherman in the row-boat was simply a dusky shadow now. Bats flitted through the air, darting and wheeling, and the muddy smell of the shoreline was heavy on the evening breeze. He could see the lights of the Temple glimmering on the water, and the storm clouds that had been out over the horizon a half hour ago loomed now in the darkening sky, creeping closer by the moment.
    “Well, if you’re all right, I’ll just go inside, then,” he said.
    She didn’t answer. Clearly she had gone downriver, as his uncle had put it. Either that or she was so mortified by the toilet seat coasters that she simply wasn’t speaking to him any longer. He went in the French doors and through the den, carrying the wet sack. In the kitchen he found his uncle heating a casserole in the microwave.
    “Rice, bay shrimp, peas, and crumbled potato chips,” Lymon said when Calvin peered in through the glass in the oven door. “It’s straight out of Betty Crocker. It’s the potato chips that do the trick. When you reheat it, though, you’ve got to scrape off the old chips; otherwise they get limp. You crumble on a fresh layer, heat the whole mess up,