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you," he said before he drank the lemonade--which he did in one long draft.
    "Now don't get brain freeze, young man."
    He stared at me for a moment. He must have thought me mad.
    "Oh don't mind me." I handed him the cordless phone Robert had attached to the wall by the fridge.
    I left the room while he made his call. A moment later, he came into the living room. "They forgot me." He smiled calmly. "I'll go wait again."
    "Please wait on my front porch, in the shade," I said. I saw him out the door, and I pointed to the wicker chairs. "Here. I insist. You don't even have a hat. You can see your ride pull up right through those trees."
    Tentatively, he sat. He looked older than most of the boys I'd seen on Tommy's trucks; late twenties, perhaps. He had an unmistakably Mayan profile, dignified yet vaguely equine. I wondered what long, sad journey had landed him here, a lawn serf in Matlock. I didn't want to know how little he was paid by Tommy Loud. I hoped he didn't have children. Not yet.
    "What's your name?" I said impulsively, holding out my hand (and thinking, fleetingly, of my gaffe at TGO). "Mine's Percy."
    He took my hand firmly, held it more than shook it. "Celestino."
    "Well then, Celestino," I said, "make yourself at home. Seventy-three strangers I've never so much as shaken hands with are about to do the same."
    I left him on the porch when the phone rang.
    "Robert!" I said when I heard my grandson's voice. "I have something hilarious to recount." I went to the kitchen table and found, just where I'd left it, the town paper open to the police log.

    Every Thursday for more than forty years, the Grange had arrived on my doorstep by 6:00 a.m., almost always before the Boston Globe . The paper had been through its ups and downs, but during the past few years its subscription rate had risen to record levels, since the latest editor in chief was a retired Pulitzer winner from the Wall Street Journal . (Yes, only in Matlock.) Which meant that the news, provincial though it was, would be delivered with efficiency, taste, and very few typos. (And that editorials, though eloquent to be sure, would bellow, COLOSSAL IF DODDERING EGO!) Yet there was still gossip, triviality, and quaintness aplenty. Christenings and confirmations (High Episcopalian) appeared on the same page as the obituaries--right across from yard sales and the scores of high school lacrosse games. Once, even Girl Scout and 4-H badges had been listed. Our resident columnist, holding forth for the past twenty years, called herself the Fence Sitter, though she was anything but. If opinions were underdrawers, she would be Fruit of the Loom.
    When Poppy was alive, I saw the paper first, before I left for Cambridge. I would circle for her the funniest or most bucolic item I could find. When I returned in the late afternoon, she would have countered by circling for me another source of amusement. I would find the paper folded open to her selection, beside it my glass of red wine, on the long rough-hewn table in the kitchen. As I took my first sip, I would gaze over the lawn toward the barn and, beyond it, the glassy veneer of the pond. Even in winter, with all the windows shut tight and glazed with frost, I would hear the music, and sometimes Poppy's voice, strident or praising or keeping time in song. Poppy taught her lessons--always sold out, often with waiting lists--until the very day she died.
    Left to raise our teenage girls, I kept many of our rituals intact--even those that hadn't involved our daughters. So I continued to circle my favorite item in the paper every week, to leave it displayed on the table. Perhaps I was hoping that when I came home, Trudy or Clover might have taken up her mother's side of our frivolous duet. But no. The paper would be in the garbage by the time I returned--or buried beneath a haphazard stack of textbooks and schoolwork, a plate of Oreos, a balled-up sweater. What a silly hope that was. I had so many silly thoughts and hopes