“Help me,” he said.

His heels pushed uselessly against the floorboards, his hands had no strength. Her nursing instincts kicked in and she stepped close, planted her feet wide, got her hands under his armpits, and lifted. He felt heavy and solid and very cool, and as his massive body rose up in front of her, she felt overwhelmed by his physical presence. Her damp palms tingled all the way up to her forearms.

He slumped forward, dropping his full weight onto her shoulders, and the intense physical contact made Patricia light-headed. She helped him to a pressed-back rocking chair by the wall, and he dropped heavily into it. Her body, freed of his weight, felt suddenly lighter than air. Her feet barely touched the floor.

“What’s wrong with you?” she asked.

“I got bitten by a wolf,” he said.

“Here?” she asked.

She saw his thigh muscles clench and relax as he began to unconsciously rock himself back and forth.

“When I was younger,” he said, then flashed his white teeth in a pained smile. “Maybe it was a wild dog and I’ve romanticized it into a wolf.”

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “Did it hurt?”

“They thought I would die,” he said. “I had a fever for several days and when I recovered I had some brain damage—just mild lesions, but they compromised the motor control in my eyes.”

She felt relieved that this was starting to make sense.

“That must be difficult,” she said.

“My irises don’t dilate very well,” he said. “So daylight is extremely painful. It’s thrown my whole body clock out of whack.”

He gestured helplessly around the room at everything piled up against the walls.

“There’s so much to do and I don’t know how to get a handle on any of it,” he said. “I’m lost.”

She looked at the liquor store boxes and bags lining the walls, full of old clothes and notebooks and slippers and medications and embroidery hoops and yellowed issues of TV Guide. Plastic bags of clothes, stacks of wire hangers, dusty framed photographs, piles of afghans, water-damaged books of Greenbax Stamps, stacks of used bingo cards rubber-banded together, glass ashtrays and bowls and spheres with sand dollars suspended in the middle.

“It’s a lot to sort out,” Patricia said. “Do you have anyone to come help? Any family? A brother? Cousins? Your wife?”

He shook his head.

“Do you want me to stay and talk to Francine?”

“She quit,” he said.

“That doesn’t sound like Francine,” Patricia said.

“I’m going to have to leave,” James Harris said, wiping sweat from his forehead. “I thought about staying but my condition makes it too hard. I feel like there’s a train already moving and no matter how fast I run I can never catch up.”

Patricia knew the feeling but she also thought about Grace, who would stay here until she had learned all she could about a good-looking, seemingly normal man who had found himself all alone in the Old Village with no wife or children. Patricia had never met a single man his age who didn’t have some kind of story. It would probably prove to be small and anticlimactic, but she was so starved for excitement she’d take any mystery she could.

“Let’s see if we can figure this out together,” she said. “What’s overwhelming you the most?”

He lifted a sheaf of mail off the cross-stretcher breakfast table next to him like it weighed five hundred pounds.

“What do I do about these?” he asked.

She went through the letters, sweat prickling her back and her upper lip. The air in the house felt stale and close.

“But these are easy,” she said, putting them down. “I don’t understand this letter from probate court, but I’ll call Buddy Barr. He’s mostly retired but he’s in our church and he’s an estate lawyer. The Waterworks is just up the street and you can be there and change the name on the account in five minutes. SCE&G has an office around the corner where you can get the electric bill put in your name.”

“It all has to be done in person,” he said. “And their offices are only open during the day when I can’t drive. Because of my eyes.”

“Oh,” Patricia said.

“If someone could drive me…,” he began.

Instantly, Patricia realized what he wanted, and she felt the jaws of yet another obligation closing around her.

“Normally I’d be happy to,” she said, quickly. “But it’s the last week of school and there’s so much to do…”

“You said it would only take five minutes.”

For a moment, Patricia resented his wheedling tone, and then she felt like a coward. She’d promised to help. She wanted to know more about him. Surely she wasn’t going to quit at the first obstacle.

“You’re right,” she said. “Let me get my car and pull it around. I’ll try to get as close to your front door as I can.”

“Can we take my van?” he asked.

Patricia balked. She couldn’t drive a stranger’s car. Besides, she’d never driven a van before.

“I—” she began.

“The tinted windows,” he said.

Of course. She nodded, not seeing another option.

“And I hate to bother you when you’re doing so much already…” he began.

Her heart sank, and then immediately she felt selfish. This man had come to her home last night and been sassed by her daughter and spat at by her mother-in-law. He was a human being asking for help. Of course she would do her best.

“What is it?” she asked, making her voice sound as warm and genuine as possible.

He stopped rocking.

“My wallet was stolen, and my birth certificate and all those kind of things are in storage back home,” he said. “I don’t know how long it’ll take someone to hunt them down. How can I do any of this without them?”

An image of Ted Bundy with his arm in a fake cast asking Brenda Ball to help him carry his books to his car flashed across Patricia’s mind. She dismissed it as undignified.

“That probate court letter is going to solve the problem of identification,” she said. “That’s all you need for the Waterworks, and when we’re there we’ll get a bill printed with your name and this address on it to show the electric company. Give me the keys and I’ll get your car.”

* * *

—

The tinted windows kept the front seats of his van dim and purple, which wasn’t such a bad thing since they were covered in stains and rips. What Patricia didn’t like was the back. He had screwed wood over the back windows to make it completely dark, and it made her nervous to drive with all that emptiness behind her.

At the Waterworks, they discovered that he had left his wallet at home. He apologized profusely, but she didn’t mind writing the one-hundred-dollar check for the deposit. He promised to pay her back as soon as they got home. At SCE&G they wanted a two-hundred-fifty-dollar deposit, and she hesitated.

“I shouldn’t have asked you to do this,” James Harris said.

She looked at him, his face already reddening with sunburn, cheeks wet with the fluid streaming from beneath his sunglasses. She weighed her sympathy against what Carter would say when he balanced their checkbook. But it was her money, too, wasn’t it? That was what Carter always said when she asked for her own bank account: this money belonged to both of them. She was a grown woman and could use it however she saw fit, even if it was to help another man.

She wrote the second check and tore it off with a brisk flick of her wrist before she could change her mind. She felt efficient. Like she was solving problems and getting things done. She felt like Grace.

Back at his house she wanted to wait on the front porch while he got his wallet, but he hustled her inside. By now it was after two o’clock and the sun pressed down hard.

“I’ll be right back,” he said, leaving her alone in his dark kitchen.

She thought about opening his refrigerator to see what he had inside. Or looking in his cupboards. She still didn’t know anything about him.

The floor cracked and he came back into the kitchen.

“Three hundred fifty dollars,” he said, counting it out on the table in worn twenties and a ten. He beamed at her, even though it looked painful to move his sunburned face. “I can’t tell you how much this means to me.”

“I’m happy to help,” she said.

“You know…,” he said, and trailed off. He looked away, then shook his head briskly. “Never mind.”

“What?” she asked.

“It’s too much,” he told her. “You’ve been wonderful. I don’t know how I can repay you.”

“What is it?” Patricia asked.

“Forget it,” he said. “It’s unfair.”

“What is?” she asked.

He got very still.

“Do you want to see something really cool? Just between the two of us?”

The inside of Patricia’s skull lit up with alarm bells. She’d read enough to know that anyone saying that, especially a stranger, was about to ask you to take a package over the border or park outside a jewelry store and keep the engine running. But when was the last time anyone had even said the word cool to her?

“Of course,” she said, dry-mouthed.