“Miss Kew, are you goin’ to let him—”

“Be quiet, Miriam! Young man, you will keep a civil—” Then her eyes popped up real round. “Who did you say…”

“Lone said so.”

“Lone.” She stood there on the stairs looking at her hands. Then she said, “Miriam, that will be all.” And you wouldn’t know it was the same woman, the way she said it.

The maid opened her mouth, but Miss Kew stuck out a finger that might as well of had a riflesight on the end of it. The maid beat it.

“Hey,” I said, “here’s your broom.” I was just going to throw it, but Miss Kew got to me and took it out of my hand.

“In there,” she said.

She made me go ahead of her into a room as big as our swimming hole. It had books all over and leather on top of the tables, with gold flowers drawn into the corners.

She pointed to a chair. “Sit there. No, wait a moment.” She went to the fireplace and got a newspaper out of a box and brought it over and unfolded it on the seat of the chair. “Now sit down.”

I sat on the paper and she dragged up another chair, but didn’t put no paper on it. “What is it? Where is Lone?”

“He died,” I said.

She pulled in her breath and went white. She stared at me until her eyes started to water.

“You sick?” I asked her. “Go ahead, throw up. It’ll make you feel better.”

“Dead? Lone is dead?”

“Yeah. There was a flash flood last week and when he went out the next night in that big wind, he walked under a old oak tree that got gullied under by the flood. The tree come down on him.”

“Came down on him,” she whispered. “Oh, no…it’s not true.”

“It’s true, all right. We planted him this morning. We couldn’t keep him around no more. He was beginning to st—”

“Stop!” She covered her face with her hands.

“What’s the matter?”

“I’ll be all right in a moment,” she said in a low voice. She went and stood in front of the fireplace with her back to me. I took off one of my shoes while I was waiting for her to come back. But instead she talked from where she was. “Are you Lone’s little boy?”

“Yeah. He told me to come to you.”

“Oh, my dear child!” She came running back and I thought for a second she was going to pick me up or something, but she stopped short and wrinkled up her nose a little bit. “Wh-what’s your name?”

“Gerry,” I told her.

“Well, Gerry, how would you like to live with me in this nice big house and—and have new clean clothes—and everything?”

“Well, that’s the whole idea. Lone told me to come to you. He said you got more dough than you know what to do with, and he said you owed him a favor.”

“A favor?” That seemed to bother her.

“Well,” I tried to tell her, “he said he done something for you once and you said some day you’d pay him back for it if you ever could. This is it.”

“What did he tell you about that?” She’d got her honk back by then.

“Not a damn thing.”

“Please don’t use that word,” she said, with her eyes closed. Then she opened them and nodded her head, “I promised and I’ll do it. You can live here from now on. If—if you want to.”

“That’s got nothin’ to do with it. Lone told me to.”

“You’ll be happy here,” she said. She gave me an up-and-down. “I’ll see to that.”

“Okay. Shall I go get the other kids?”

“Other kids—children?”

“Yeah. This ain’t for just me. For all of us—the whole gang.”

“Don’t say ‘ain’t.’ ” She leaned back in her chair, took out a silly little handkerchief and dabbed her lips with it, looking at me the whole time. “Now tell me about these—these other children.”

“Well, there’s Janie, she’s eleven like me. And Bonnie and Beanie are eight, they’re twins, and Baby. Baby is three.”

“Baby is three,” she said.

I screamed. Stern was kneeling beside the couch in a flash, holding his palms against my cheeks to hold my head still; I’d been whipping it back and forth.

“Good boy,” he said. “You found it. You haven’t found out what it is, but now you know where it is.”

“But for sure,” I said hoarsely. “Got water?”

He poured me some water out of a thermos flask. It was so cold it hurt. I lay back and rested, like I’d climbed a cliff. I said, “I can’t take anything like that again.”

“You want to call it quits for today?”

“What about you?”

“I’ll go on as long as you want me to.”

I thought about it. “I’d like to go on, but I don’t want no thumping around. Not for a while yet.”

“If you want another of those inaccurate analogies,” Stern said, “psychiatry is like a road map. There are always a lot of different ways to get from one place to another place.”

“I’ll go around by the long way,” I told him. “The eight-lane highway. Not that track over the hill. My clutch is slipping. Where do I turn off?”

He chuckled. I liked the sound of it. “Just past that gravel driveway.”

“I been there. There’s a bridge washed out.”