“Gideon Page,” he says, his eyes twinkling as he comes up to us.

“What an appreciative kid you were. You thought I was a magician, but then you were kind of dumb in science, weren’t you?”

“Yes, sir,” I say, getting to my feet, marveling that he remembers. He probably doesn’t. Mediocrity is always a safe bet, and as a lifelong teacher, he knew the odds.

“It’s good to see you, Mr. Carpenter. You were the best teacher I ever had in nineteen years of going to school.”

Rubbing his hands on a dirty apron, he beams as if I had just awarded him the Nobel Prize.

Teachers have learned to be content with praise in Arkansas.

“You know how much I liked your mother. A well-bred woman who deserved better luck. After your father died, she couldn’t do a thing with you, though, until those Catholics scared the be jesus out of you. Are you still superstitious?”

He offers his hand, and I take it.

Religious, I think he means. What a character he still is! Mr. Carpenter, a lifelong bachelor and, I suddenly realize, homosexual, lived two doors down from us. He used to quiz me about what the fathers and brothers were teaching me when I returned home for holidays and summers. He’d rail at me, “Those damn Papists were first-class truth muzzlers! Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes, anybody with a brain they scared shitless.”

“When did you open a restaurant, Mr. Carpenter?”

I ask, as if I have been away at school.

“I never knew you could cook.”

The old man tugs at the St. Louis Cardinals cap that’s perched atop his

still formidable head of hair, which closely resembles cotton left too long in the fields, then tells Angela, “Gideon’s grandfather on his mother’s side knew some science. He couldn’t cure anybody-they didn’t have antibiotics then-but he was an intelligent man. Gideon got his gift for gab from his paternal grandfather. Now, there was a man who could rattle on for hours and never say a damn thing.”