After what seemed like a lifetime, and a very uncomfortable one at that, Fat Charlie patted down the final shovelful of dirt.
Mrs. Higgler walked over to him. She took his jacket off the fence and handed it to him.
“You’re soaked to the skin and covered in dirt and sweat, but you grew up. Welcome home, Fat Charlie,” she said, and she smiled, and she held him to her vast breast.
“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. 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.
Right now, Mrs. Dunwiddy was eating lumps of curry goat with her fingers from a small Tupperware bowl. “Pity to waste it,” she said, and dropped the bits of goat bone into a china saucer.
“Time for you to eat, Fat Charlie?” asked Miss Noles.
“I’m fine,” said Fat Charlie. “Honest.”
Four pairs of eyes stared at him reproachfully through four pairs of spectacles. “No good starvin‘ yourself in your grief,” said Mrs. Dunwiddy, licking her fingertips, and picking out another brown fatty lump of goat.