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for work, but I still have to come up with the payment. It’s already two weeks overdue.”
    Peaches didn’t say a word, but the quality of her silence had changed. I could almost feel her growing anxiety.
    “Peaches?”
    “Why do you want to do this to me, Charles?”
    “What am I doing to you?”
    “You’re thirty-nine years old —”
    “Thirty-three,” I corrected.
    “— thirty-three years old and you don’t even have two nickels to rub together. What would your mother say?”
    “My mother is dead. Maybe you could leave her alone.”
    “Rude.” She said the word like it was a club to blud-geon me with. “Rude. And then you want me to write the check. I’m sorry, Charles, but I have to agree with Floyd about you. There’s no helping someone who can’t help himself. I just hope you don’t lose our family home with your foolishness. But maybe it would be better in someone else’s hands anyway. I can see you don’t have a gardener anymore and from what I hear it’s a pigsty on the inside.”
    I hung up. It was the only way I could get her to feel the pain that she was inflicting on me. I knew she was right. I knew that my life was messed up. But what could I do about it when I couldn’t get a job or pay my bills?
    I spent the entire night cleaning. I collected eight big plastic bags of trash. I swept and dusted and mopped and straightened. When I’d get tired I’d stop for a little chicken soup and black tea. Then I was off again, up and down through the three floors. At 4:00 in the morning I dragged the bags out of the house and into the street. I wasn’t going to let Peaches and Floyd defeat me. I’d put the house in perfect shape. I had plans to wax the floors and mow the lawn. I’d trim the hedge too. After that I’d paint the house. This last thought almost defeated me. How could I paint with no money? I couldn’t even buy a roller or brush, much less all the gallons of paint that I’d need.
    Outside I noticed a spark. At first I thought it was a firefly, and I stopped to catch a glimpse of it again. Fireflies were a miracle to me. The fact of their light seemed somehow to prove that there was a God.
    After a moment the light appeared again. But it wasn’t a firefly at all. It was Miss Littleneck smoking a cigarette in the dark. At first I was mad, thinking that she was spying on me. But then I thought that if she was really spying, she wouldn’t be advertising with an ember. It was almost as amazing as a firefly—that old woman sitting out on her porch all night long, smoking one cigarette after another, waiting for either a miracle or a heart attack.
    The next day was Sunday. I’d fallen asleep on the sofa in my father’s library. After three hours’ sleep I was out in the front yard with a scythe.
    That was a gas.
    Christ’s Hope Church was just three blocks up from my house and many a churchgoer had to drive past my place. Almost everyone slowed to see me stripped to the waist, cutting down the dead weeds and grasses that had grown wild for years.
    Peaches and Floyd drove by. They came to a virtual stop in order to gawk. I smiled at them and waved. Peaches said something to her husband and they sped off to God.
     
     
     

• 7 •
     
     
    T hat was one of the hardest days I ever put in. Twelve thirty-nine-gallon plastic bags of trash and dead weeds. I only had two empty bags left. In the afternoon I broke my fast with instant coffee, baked beans, and quick-cooking polenta. I carried the meal on a tray up to the third floor, to my mother’s sewing room, which was a small chamber off her bedroom. There she had a treadle-powered sewing machine and a small table meant for piecework.
    I put my tray on the table and stared out the window like I used to do as a child when my parents were out. Her window was the observation deck for my fortress. I could see our family graveyard and my great-grandfather’s stand of oaks and then up the side of the piney hills behind our community.