“I’m Mrs. Peter Wilmot.”

Misty Marie Wilmot, the original shrewish bitch monster in the flesh. She tells him, “I was working at the Waytansea Hotel when you called this morning.”

Angel Delaporte nods, looking at his empty wineglass. The glass, sweaty and smeared with fingerprints. He holds the wineglass up between them and says, “You want I should get you a drink?”

He looks at where she pressed her face to his dining room wall, where she let one tear leak out and smeared his blue-striped wallpaper. A wet print of her eye, the crow’s-feet around her eye, her obicularis oculi behind bars. Still holding the unlit cigarette in one hand, he takes his white terry cloth belt in his other hand and scrubs at the tearstain. And he says, “I’ll give you a book. It’s called Graphology . You know, handwriting analysis.”

And Misty, who really did think the Wilmot house, the sixteen acres on Birch Street, meant happily ever after, she says, “You want to maybe rent a place for the summer?” She looks at his wineglass and says, “A big old stone house. Not on the mainland, but out on the island ?”

And Angel Delaporte, he looks back over his shoulder at her, at Misty’s hips, then her breasts inside her pink uniform, then her face. He squints and shakes his head a little and says, “Don’t worry, your hair’s not that gray.”

His cheek and temple, all around his eye, he’s powdered with white plaster dust.

And Misty, your wife, she reaches toward him, her fingers held open. Her palm turned up, the skin rashy and red, she tells him, “Hey, if you don’t believe I’m me,” she says, “you can smell my hand.”

YOUR POOR WIFE, she’s racing from the dining room to the music room, grabbing up silver candlesticks, little gilded mantel clocks, and Dresden figurines and stuffing them in a pillowcase. Misty Marie Wilmot, after working the breakfast shift, now she’s looting the big Wilmot house on Birch Street. Like she’s a goddamn burglar in her own house, she’s snatching up silver cigarette boxes and pillboxes and snuffboxes. Off fireplace mantels and nightstands, she’s collecting saltcellars and carved-ivory knickknacks. She’s lugging around the pillowcase, heavy and clanking with gilded-bronze gravy boats and hand-painted porcelain platters.

Still in her pink plastic uniform, sweat stains wet under each arm. Her name tag pinned to her chest, it lets all the strangers in the hotel call her Misty. Your poor wife. She works the same kind of shitty restaurant job her mom did.

Unhappily ever after.

After that, she’s running home to pack. She’s slinging around a string of keys as noisy as anchor chains. A string of keys like a cluster of iron grapes. These are long and short keys. Fancy notched skeleton keys. Brass and steel keys. Some are barrel keys, hollow like the barrel of a gun, some of them as big as a pistol, the kind a pissed-off wife might tuck in her garter and use to shoot an idiot husband.

Misty is jabbing keys into locks to see if they’ll turn. She’s trying the locks on cabinets and closet doors. She’s trying key after key. Stab and twist. Jab and turn. And each time a lock pops open, she dumps the pillowcase inside, the gilded mantel clocks and silver napkin rings and lead crystal compotes, and she locks the door.

Today is moving-out day. It’s another longest day of the year.

In the big house on East Birch Street, everybody’s supposed to be packing, but no. Your daughter comes downstairs with a total of nothing to wear for the rest of her life. Your loony mother, she’s still cleaning. She’s somewhere in the house, dragging the old vacuum cleaner around, on her hands and knees, picking threads and bits of lint out of the rugs and feeding them into the vacuum hose. Like it matters a good goddamn how the rugs look. Like the Wilmot family will ever live here ever again.

Your poor wife, that silly girl who came here a million years ago from some trailer park in Georgia, she doesn’t know where to begin.

It’s not like the Wilmot family couldn’t see this coming. You don’t just wake up one day and find the trust fund empty. All the family money gone.

It’s only noon, and she’s trying to put off her second drink. The second is never as good as the first. The first one is so perfect. Just a little breather. A little something to keep her company. It’s only four hours until the renter comes for the keys. Mr. Delaporte. Until they need to vacate.

It’s not even a real drink drink. It’s a glass of wine, and she’s only had one, maybe two swallows. Still, just knowing it’s nearby. Just knowing the glass is still at least half full. It’s a comfort.

After the second drink, she’ll take a couple aspirin. Another couple drinks, another couple aspirin, and this will get her through today.

In the big Wilmot house on East Birch Street, just inside the front door, you’ll find what looks like graffiti. Your wife, she’s dragging around her pillowcase of loot when she sees it—some words scribbled on the back of the front door. The pencil marks there, the names and dates on the white paint. Starting from knee high, you can see dark little straight lines, and along each line a name and number:

Tabbi, age five.

Tabbi, who’s twelve now with lateral canthal rhytides around her eyes from crying.

Or: Peter, age seven.

That’s you, age seven. Little Peter Wilmot.

Some scribbles say: Grace, age six, age eight, age twelve. They go up to Grace, age seventeen. Grace with her baggy jowls of submental fat and deep playsmal bands around her neck.

Sound familiar?

Does any of this ring a bell?

These pencil lines, the crest of a flood tide. The years 1795 . . . 1850 . . . 1979 . . . 2003. Old pencils were thin sticks of wax mixed with soot and wrapped with string to keep your hands clean. Before that are just notches and initials carved in the thick wood and white paint of the door.

Some other names on the back of the door, you won’t recognize. Herbert and Caroline and Edna, a lot of strangers who lived here, grown and gone. Infants, then children, adolescents, adults, then dead. Your blood relations, your family, but strangers. Your legacy. Gone, but not gone. Forgotten but still here to be discovered.

Your poor wife, she’s standing just inside the front door, looking at the names and dates just one last time. Her own name not among them. Poor white trash Misty Marie, with her rashy red hands and her pink scalp showing through her hair.

All this history and tradition she used to think would keep her safe. Insulate her, forever.

This isn’t typical. She’s not a boozer. In case anybody needs to be reminded, she’s under a lot of stress. Forty-one fucking years old, and now she has no husband. No college degree. No real work experience—unless you count scrubbing the toilet . . . stringing cranberries for the Wilmot Christmas tree . . . All she’s got is a kid and a mother-in-law to support. It’s noon, and she’s got four hours to pack everything of value in the house. Starting with the silverware, the paintings, the china. Everything they can’t trust to a renter.

Your daughter, Tabitha, comes down from upstairs. Twelve years old, and all she’s carrying is one little suitcase and a shoe box wrapped with rubber bands. With none of her winter clothes or boots. She’s packed just a half dozen sundresses, some jeans, and her swimsuit. A pair of sandals, the tennis shoes she’s wearing.

Your wife, she’s snatching up a bristling ancient ship model, the sails stiff and yellowed, the rigging as fine as cobwebs, and she says, “Tabbi, you know we’re not coming back.”

Tabitha stands in the front hallway and shrugs. She says, “Granmy says we are.”

Granmy is what she calls Grace Wilmot. Her grandmother, your mother.