Bucky returned. "She says go ahead. We gotta be somewhere shortly and she's just now getting dressed. My dad'll be back in a little while. He went down to Perdido to look at lighting fixtures. We're trying to get Pappy's apartment fixed up to rent." He paused in the doorway, apparently seeing the room as I did. "Looks like a dump, but Pappy was real tight with a buck."

"How long have you lived here?"

"Coming up on two years, ever since Babe and me got married," he said. "I thought the old bird'd give us a break on the rent, but he made a science out of being cheap."

Being cheap myself, I was naturally curious. Maybe I could pick up some pointers, I thought. "Like what?"

Bucky's mouth pulled down. "I don't know. He didn't like to pay for trash pickup, so he'd go out early on trash days and put his garbage in the neighbors' cans. And, you know, like somebody told him once when you pay utility bills? All you have to do is use a one-cent stamp, leave off the return address, and drop it in a remote mailbox. The post office will deliver it because the city wants their money, so you can save on postage."

I said, "Hey, what a deal. What do you figure, ten bucks a year? That'd be hard to resist. He must have been quite a character."

"You never met him?"

"I used to see him up at Rosie's, but I don't think we ever met."

Bucky nodded at the fireplace. "That's him over there. One on the right."

I followed his gaze, expecting to see a photograph sitting on the mantelpiece. All I saw were three urns and a medium-size metal box. Bucky said, "That greeny marble urn is my grammaw, and right beside her is my uncle Duane. He's my daddy's only brother, killed when he's a kid. He was eight, I think. Playing on the tracks and got run over by a train. My aunt Maple's in the black urn."