"You're really done."

"I'm really done."

"Completely and totally?"

"The works, Saxolini. Everything." I jigged my shoulders and still felt as if I weighed two pounds.

She was sitting on a high chromium stool, sanding what looked like a rough wooden hand. Nails was under the table snuffling around a big bone we'd gotten him the day before.

"Wait a minute," She put the hand down and got off the stool. "Go out of the kitchen for a little while. I'll call you when I want you to come back in."

Nails and I went out on the porch. He dropped the bone where I stopped, and lay down on top of it. I looked out at the still garden and empty street. I literally had no idea of what day it was.

"Okay, Thomas, you can come back in now."

Without a word from me, Nails picked up his bone and walked to the screen door. He waited there with his nose pressed to the wire mesh. How did he know things like that? Nails the Wonder Dog.

"I'm not completely done with it yet, but I wanted you to have it today."

From one of the photographs of Marshall France, she had carved a meticulously detailed mask of the King. The expression on his face, the color in his eyes, his skin, lips.. , it was all awesomely real. I turned it over and over in my hands, looking at it from every conceivable angle. I loved it but was also very spooked by it.

A Queen of Oil from Anna, a Marshall France from Saxony, my chapter done, and the fall had just about arrived – my favorite season of the year.

Anna loved the first chapter.

I gave it to her and spent an hour quivering and twitching and hopping around her living room, touching everything in sight and sure that she would hate everything that I had written and would want me out of town on the next freight. When she came back into the room with it stuffed up under her arm like an old newspaper, I knew that it was curtains. But it wasn't. Instead she walked over, handed it to me, and kissed me hard on both cheeks as the French do.

"Wunderbar!"

"It is?" I smiled, frowned, tried to smile again, but couldn't.

"Yes, it most certainly is, Mr. Abbey. I didn't know what you were doing when I first began reading, but then the whole thing opened up like those Japanese stones that you throw in water and they suddenly blossom up like moonflowers. Do you know what I mean?"

"I guess so," I was having trouble swallowing.

She sat down on the couch and picked up a black silk pillow with a yellow dragon on it. "You were right all along. The book must open up like a peacock's tail – whoosh! It would have been wrong for it to start in Rattenberg. 'He was born in Rattenberg.' No, no. 'He didn't like tomatoes.' Perfect! The perfect beginning. How did you know that? He hated tomatoes. He would have howled, howled with laughter if he had known that his official biography would begin like that. It is wonderful, Thomas."

"It is?"

"Stop saying, 'It is?' Of course it is. You know that as well as I do. You've caught him, Thomas. If the rest of your book is this good" – she waved the manuscript at me and then kissed the damned thing – "he'll be living and breathing again. And you will have done it for him. I am not going to say another word about how I think it should be written."

If it had ended there, the credits would have come up over a picture of young Thomas Abbey taking his manuscript from the alluring Anna France, walking out of the house and down the road to fame and fortune and the love of a good woman. A Screen Gems Production. The End.

What happened instead was, two days after that, a freak late summer tornado whipped through Galen and made a total mess of everything. One of the only human casualties was Saxony, who got a compound fracture of her left leg and had to he taken to the hospital.

The townspeople were unruffled by the tornado, although the Laundromat was leveled, as were parts of the elementary school and new post office. Whether it was Midwestern stoicism or what, no one moaned or groaned or made much of a fuss about it. A couple of times people told me that you had to expect that kind of thing out here.

I missed having Saxony around, and I moped through the house for a couple of days doing nothing, but then I forced myself to create a daily schedule that would be both comfortable and productive. If nothing else, I knew that she would have yelled at me if she found out that I wasn't working on the book while she was in the hospital.

I got up around eight, had breakfast, and worked on the book until noon or one. Then I made up a couple of sandwiches and drove over to the hospital in time to have a leisurely lunch with Sax. That lasted until about three or four, when I went home and either did some more work if I was in the mood, or started preparing my bachelor dinner. Mrs. Fletcher offered to cook for me, but that meant having to eat with her. After dinner I would type up what I'd written that morning, then round off my day with some television or reading.

The second chapter went very slowly. It was the one where I first started retracing my steps through France's life. I knew that it would be best to go back to his childhood, but the question was, where in his childhood? Begin at the beginning with him howling in the cradle? Or as a kid collecting postcards, а la Saxony's idea? I wrote up two or three involved outlines and read them to her, but we agreed that none of them fit. I decided to change my tack – I would just begin writing, as I'd done with the first chapter, and see where it took me. I'd base it on his days in Rattenberg, but if it wandered off, I'd let it go, like a divining rod. If worse came to worst and it got crazy, I could always throw it out.

At night, in between shows like The Streets of San Francisco and Charlie's Angels, I also began thinking about doing the book on my father. Since Saxony had mentioned it, I realized how often I did talk and think about him. Literally every day some kind of Stephen Abbey ectoplasm materialized, whether it was an anecdote, one of his films on television, a quality in him that I'd remember and then recognize in myself. Would I be exorcised of Stephen Abbey if I wrote about him? And how would my mother react? I knew that she was in love with him long after he drove her away with his manic looniness. If I wrote about him, I'd want to tell everything that I remembered, not like those offensive "I Remember Daddy" things that famous people's kids write all the time and are usually the worst kind of phony adoration or ghost-written hatred and abuse. I called my mother to wish her a happy September 1 (a little tradition we had), but I didn't have the nerve to broach the subject.

I was sitting in the kitchen at the table one night writing down some memories when the doorbell rang. I sighed and capped my pen. I had filled four sides of my long yellow paper and felt I'd only gotten started. I gaped at the pad and shook my head. "Life with Pa-Pa," by Thomas Abbey. I got up to answer the door.

"Hi, Thomas, I've come to take you out on a midnight picnic."

She was dressed all in black, ready for a commando raid.

"Hi, Anna. Come on in." I held the door open, but she didn't budge.

"No, the car is all packed and you have to come with me right now. And don't say that it's eleven o'clock at night. That is when picnics like this get started."

I looked to see if she was kidding. When I saw that she wasn't, I turned off all the lights and got my jacket.

The days were cooler, and some of the nights were pure fall-cold. I'd bought a bright red mackinaw at Lazy Larry's Discount Center. Saxony said that I looked like a cross between a stoplight and Fred Flintstone in it.

The moon was a werewolf's delight – full, gravel-white – and seemed half a mile away. The stars were out too, but the moon held center stage. I stopped before I got to the car and stared up at it while I buttoned every button on my coat. My breath misted white on the still air. Anna stood on the other side and propped her black elbows on the roof of the car,