I stood at the railing with Joan and Marquis and a pitcher of tea and listened to them for an hour, and I didn't know, and I still don't, as I write this on a cool evening in early May with the fountain going in the pond and the light going violet over Plover Lane, what I owe the man sitting next to my father on that swing. The law says I owe him nothing. The law says I'm a bona fide purchaser for value without notice, and that's true. I didn't know. Neither did Marcella, not really, not the whole of it. That's the trouble with not knowing. It's an excellent defense and a very poor excuse, and I spent twenty-nine years explaining the difference to other people.
Marquis asked me, before they left, whether I'd made up my mind about the house.
"Not yet," I said.
He nodded. He didn't seem angry. "Granddaddy says he doesn't want it back," he said. "Says he's too old to cut the grass. Says he just wanted to see if they'd painted over the ceiling." He paused at the bottom of the steps. "But he'd like to come sit sometimes. If that's okay."
"Every Sunday," I said, "if he wants. My father needs somebody to lose to."
They drove off. My father stayed on the swing, rocking gently, with the radio turned low. The streetlight came on at the corner. After a while, up the street, a door opened, and a woman in a gray cardigan came out of the big gray house and walked down to the mailboxes, no visor, no flashlight. She got her mail. She looked down the street at us. Then she lifted her hand, slowly, and waved.
I waved back. All five fingers.
The haint-blue ceiling is still above me, and the house is still mine, for now. What I'll do about it, I haven't decided. Lorenzo used to say that the hardest thing in the world is to keep doing the right thing after everybody else has stopped watching. I'm the chief of police in a small town where everybody watches everything, and I've learned that he was wrong about that, a little. The hardest thing isn't doing it when nobody's watching. It's knowing what it is.
I'll figure it out. It's small enough here that I might actually fix something.