“I’m not crying,” said Fat Charlie.

“Hush now,” said Mrs. Higgler.

“It’s the rain on my face,” said Fat Charlie.

Mrs. Higgler didn’t say anything. She just held him, and swayed backward and forward, and after a while Fat Charlie said, “It’s okay. I’m better now.”

“There’s food back at my house,” said Mrs. Higgler. “Let’s get you fed.”

He wiped the mud from his shoes in the parking lot, then he got into his gray rental car, and he followed Mrs. Higgler in her maroon station wagon down streets that had not existed twenty years earlier. Mrs. Higgler drove like a woman who had just discovered an enormous and much-needed mug of coffee and whose primary mission was to drink as much coffee as she was able to while driving as fast as possible; and Fat Charlie drove along behind her, keeping up as best he could, racing from traffic light to traffic light while trying to figure out more or less where they were.

And then they turned down a street, and, with mounting apprehension, he realized he recognized it. This was the street he had lived on as a boy. Even the houses looked more or less the same, although most of them had now grown impressive wire-mesh fences around their front yards.

There were several cars already parked in front of Mrs. Higgler’s house. He pulled up behind an elderly gray Ford. Mrs. Higgler walked up to the front door, opened it with her key.

Fat Charlie looked down at himself, muddy and sweat-soaked. “I can’t go in looking like this,” he said.

“I seen worse,” said Mrs. Higgler. Then she sniffed. “I tell you what, you go in there, go straight into the bathroom, you can wash off your hands and face, clean yourself up, and when you’re ready we’ll all be in the kitchen.”

He went into the bathroom. Everything smelled like jasmine. He took off his muddy shirt, and washed his face and hands with jasmine-scented soap, in a tiny washbasin.