Night after night I would dream that I had woken up half a second too late, her words only a fading echo, but when I tried to ask her what she wanted I had no voice. Sometimes I had the dream several times in one night, and I racked my brain for days trying to figure out a way to rig Gram’s Kodak to take a picture of the figure. I thought of strings and pulleys and weights but never solved the problem of how to trigger the shutter at the right time. Once I almost asked L.A. to watch me sleep, then came to my senses just in time to bite my tongue. All she or Gram needed at this point was to find out the only man in the house had lost his mind. I decided to keep working on the problem on my own and keep my mouth shut. A lot of the time Gram seemed tired and sad, but she gave no sign whether it was the mystery of L.A. she was worried about, or something else. And tired or not, she had her routines. For her this was the time of vegetables, and at least twice a week now she drove all the way down to Farmers Market at Central to walk along the rows of tables piled high with bright summer produce, coming home hours later with paper bags full of cucumbers, fat vine-ripened tomatoes, pole beans and purple-hulls, new potatoes and all sizes and colors of peppers she’d haggled away from the truck farmers and their wives down there.
