He took a washcloth and wiped down his chest, and scrubbed at the muddiest lumps on his suit trousers. He looked at the shirt, which had been white when he put it on this morning and was now a particularly grubby brown, and decided not to put it back on. He had more shirts in his bag, in the backseat of the rental car. He would slip back out of the house, put on a clean shirt, then face the people in the house.

He unlocked the bathroom door, and opened it.

Four elderly ladies were standing in the corridor, staring at him. He knew them. He knew all of them.

“What you doing now?” asked Mrs. Higgler.

“Changing shirt,” said Fat Charlie. “Shirt in car. Yes. Back soon.”

He raised his chin high, and strode down the corridor and out of the front door.

“What kind of language was that he was talkin?” asked little Mrs. Dunwiddy, behind his back, loudly.

“That’s not something you see every day,” said Mrs. Bustamonte, although, this being Florida’s Treasure Coast, if there was something you did see every day, it was topless men, although not usually with muddy suit trousers on.

Fat Charlie changed his shirt by the car, and went back into the house. The four ladies were in the kitchen, industriously packing away into Tupperware containers what looked like it had until recently been a large spread of food.

Mrs. Higgler was older than Mrs. Bustamonte, and both of them were older than Miss Noles, and none of them was older than Mrs. Dunwiddy. Mrs. Dunwiddy was old, and she looked it. There were geological ages that were probably younger than Mrs. Dunwiddy.

As a boy, Fat Charlie had imagined Mrs. Dunwiddy in Equatorial Africa, peering disapprovingly though her thick spectacles at the newly erect hominids. “Keep out of my front yard,” she would tell a recently evolved and rather nervous specimen of Homo habilis, “or I going to belt you around your ear hole, I can tell you.” Mrs. Dunwiddy smelled of violet water and beneath the violets she smelled of very old woman indeed. She was a tiny old lady who could outglare a thunderstorm, and Fat Charlie, who had, over two decades ago, followed a lost tennis ball into her yard, and then broken one of her lawn ornaments, was still quite terrified of her.