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and you’ve really got something. Better the second time around.”
    “It looks delicious.”
    “Your aunt will probably take hers outside tonight. She likes to be out on the river this time of the evening, especially when there’s weather.”
    “I can see why. It’s beautiful out there. So how’s she coming along?”
    “Come see, come saw,” his uncle said. “Some days are better than others. The cancer’s pretty far advanced. It wasin remission for a while, but when it came back …” He shook his head. “She’s still all right alone, though. She can take care of herself, at least for short periods of time.”
    “That’s good,” Calvin said. “That makes a big difference.”
    “I point it out because you’re free to come and go. I’m heading over to the Temple in an hour for a little meeting. I’d invite you along, but it’s an official thing, you know, just the Elders.”
    “That reminds me of something,” Calvin said. “Bob Postum asked me to tell you that he’d see you at the Temple one of these evenings soon. He specifically wanted me to say ‘sooner rather than later.’ I thought he was being friendly, but now it doesn’t sound that way.”
    His uncle shrugged. “It’s a lot of malarkey is what it is—nothing for you to worry about. Did he say ‘the Temple’ or ‘the Temple Bar’?”
    “Not the same thing?”
    “Well, loosely speaking, but your man Postum isn’t loose with his speech. He’ll lie to your face, but it’ll be carefully phrased, if you see what I mean. The building was meant to be a church, a meetinghouse, and it was referred to as the Temple from the earliest days.”
    “Is there a Knights Templar connection there?” Calvin asked.
    “It’s the same jargon. And you’ve seen the regalia. Sure there’s a connection. Anyway, the Temple was built on what looks like a sandbar, although of course it’s actually bedrock; otherwise it would have washed away years ago. People still call the island out there the Temple Bar because of the sandbar connection. And when it came to be used for social functions, and they put in the actual bar, then people started calling the
building
the Temple Bar, by which they meant something like a clubhouse. But aclubhouse isn’t the club, you know, just like a church building isn’t the church.”
    “So Postum didn’t mean that he would stop in for a drink?”
    “Not if I had to guess, but a man like that enjoys being obscure. Are you all right with your own company tonight?”
    “Sure,” Calvin said. “I’ll probably hit the hay early anyway.”
    “Healthy, wealthy, and wise, eh? Good for you. You might think about joining up, though, while you’re out here. You’ve got a better pedigree than Bob Postum.”
    “I’m pretty much dug in out in Eagle Rock.”
    “Why not dig yourself out? With the equity you’ve got in that house of yours, you’d end up with money in the bank moving out here to New Cyprus. We’ve got a kind of rent control thing going. We like to move someone into a house without listing it—keep everything in the family. Most of the time, money doesn’t even change hands. The Knights take care of their own. Did Nettie say anything about it?”
    “About what?”
    “You becoming a Knight. It’s been on her mind a lot these days. When she’s … adrift … like she is tonight, she gets an idea about things. You don’t want to take what she says lightly, because it might just come to pass.”
    The buzzer on the microwave went off, and at that same moment the bottom fell out of the water-soaked bag that Calvin was holding, and the tiny toilet dropped out onto the kitchen table, the seats falling off and clattering away, a couple of them dropping to the floor. One of them landed on the Aunt Iris box. His uncle peered at it. “ ‘I crapped out in Las Vegas,’ “ he read, and then chuckled. “We used tocall it ‘lost wages.’ If they sold one of these toilets to everyone who crapped out, they’d