While these emotions and memories fired inside the old man, Hilly Brown approached. He was quite large, much taller than Ptolemy and almost as wide as the door.

“Can I come in, Papa Grey?”

“Do I know you?”

“I’m your great-grandnephew,” he said again, “June’s grandson.”

Too many names were moving around Ptolemy’s mind. Hilly sounded familiar; and June, too, had a place behind the door that kept many of his memories alive but mostly unavailable.

That’s how Ptolemy imagined the disposition of his memories, his thoughts: they were still his, still in the range of his thinking, but they were, many and most of them, locked on the other side of a closed door that he’d lost the key for. So his memory became like secrets held away from his own mind. But these secrets were noisy things; they babbled and muttered behind the door, and so if he listened closely he might catch a snatch of something he once knew well.

“June, June was . . . my niece,” he said.

“Yeah,” the boy said, smiling. “Can I come in, Uncle?”

“Sure you can.”

“You have to move back so I can get by.”

In a flash of realization Ptolemy understood what the boy was saying. He, Ptolemy, was in the way and he had to move in order for him to have company. It wasn’t a crazy woman addict stealing his money but a visitor.

The old man smiled but did not move.

Hilly put out both hands pushing his uncle gently aside as he eased past into the detritus of a lifetime piled into those rooms like so much soil pressed down into a grave.

Ptolemy followed the hulking boy in.

“What’s that smell?” Hilly asked.

“What smell? I don’t smell nuthin’.”

“Uh, it’s bad.” Hilliard Bernard Brown moved a stack of Ptolemy’s metal folding chairs that were leaning against the bathroom door.

“Don’t go in there,” Ptolemy said. “That’s my bathroom. That’s private.”