“You smoke too much,” Aunty Mabel said.

Indeed, I’d noticed that on the ceiling over where my uncle was sitting was a distinct brown stain, spreading out from the middle like an aura.

When I offered to help with dinner my aunt shook her head and pointed through the glass doors at the back patio. The red-and-white-webbed lounge chairs that had been there when I was a child had been replaced by ones cushioned in lengths of squishy lime green tubing. “Xiuxi.”

The grass in the backyard was overgrown and weedy. From where I lay I could see that the grapefruit trees hadn’t been kept up, but here and there among the glossy dark leaves a patch of yellow showed through. A palmetto plant made a sagging fountain in the middle of the yard. There was even a full-fledged palm tree, a short one whose trunk was the shape and pattern of a pineapple. Honeysuckle draped from the eaves of the garage, entwined with a vine that shot out trumpet flowers the color of blood oranges. The flowers were so beautiful I knew they must be poisonous. And the air was brimming. It wasn’t just honeysuckle I smelled, there was something even more heady, a fragrant rush that was almost decadent.

The South pulled no punches when it came to decadence.

I fell asleep and dreamed I was five years old again and very sick. Pneumonia with complications. It was our first winter on Coram Drive. There were ghosts in the room, hiding in the pattern of the apple blossom wallpaper, in my clothes. I was staring at my favorite T-shirt folded on top of the bureau. It was red and blue stripes, with very thin black stripes between. Ma came in and I pointed to the shirt. “What?” she said. I pointed again. She picked it up and shook it and a ghost flew out and into the open door of the closet.

I opened my eyes and was back in Florida. In the yard to my right a sprinkler was going. What had awakened me was the sound of a car pulling into the gravel driveway. A middle-aged women in a pink top and mint green denim shorts carried grocery bags into the house. She gave a friendly nod as she passed. “We have such nice neighbors, this quiet old Oriental couple,” I imagined her telling people. “And now their sweet young niece has come down from Connecticut to keep them company.”

A heavy, slow breeze stirred against my pale chill northern skin, teasing the blood to the surface. I enjoyed the caress, not moving until my aunt called me for dinner.

She told me the smell was confederate jasmine. “Behind the garage, you see. All yellow.”

“Watch out for armadillo,” Uncle Richard added.

“Armadillo?”

“What do you think makes all those tunnels in the lawn? Big Mama Armadillo. Your aunt is out by the garage the other day and she sees one of the babies. Usually they don’t come out in daytime. She jumps and says, ‘Ai-yah!’ Armadillo jumps even higher than she does!”

As easygoing as my aunt and uncle were, conversation with them was exhausting. After dinner I excused myself as soon as was tactfully possible, and retreated back to the guest room. I took out Mel’s book and propped myself up in the twin bed farthest from the door, near the window, where I’d slept so many years ago. On the sill was a parade of little glass animals, starting with the rat. The signs of the Chinese zodiac. I picked up my year, the dog. It looked like some kind of spaniel. Strong and reliable. Last in line was pig, Marty’s year. Lazy but lucky.

I set the dog back in its place and let the book fall open to the page that had been read the most. It was Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Over Goldengrove unleaving?

I knew it by heart. It was one of the poems Fran had recited to me over and over on the banks of the Sudbury River. I saw that Mel had marked the last two lines:

Next morning was overcast and cooler, the house perfectly silent as I checked my watch. I’d thrown my wedding ring into the East River, given the pear diamond back to Carey (it had been his grandmother’s), but this token of my marriage I kept because it was from Ma, the most expensive present I’d ever gotten from her. Six-thirty. I was still on hospital time. I got out of bed and, still wearing the T-shirt I’d slept in, pulled on my corduroys. In the kitchen, my aunt and uncle’s other cat, a little tiger, rubbed against my ankles and then shot through my legs when I slid open the glass doors to the patio.

I went out barefoot into the backyard and made my way through the tall grass, cold and heavy with dew, leaned against the back fence, and lit up a cigarette. That was a terrible habit I’d picked up in the hospital, smoking first thing in the morning on an empty stomach, but there was something divine about it too, the buzz so strong it was sick-making. I noticed the grapefruit lying scattered beneath the trees like bocce balls. They were rotting, riddled with insect holes. The grapefruit still in the trees didn’t look much better. The ones Ma had brought to me at the hospital were obviously not from this yard. For a moment I entertained the urge to paint them, and then I stubbed out my cigarette and put the butt in my pocket and began picking up the decaying fruit, making a heap in the corner by the fence.

If only it could always be early morning or night. It was the day that killed me.

I heard the shrill of the teakettle from the kitchen and when I went back inside Aunty Mabel was pouring hot water into mugs filled with leaves. On the stove something acrid-smelling simmered in a clay pot. In the cool morning light I could see how my aunt’s face was a reflection of my mother’s. But where high cheekbones made Ma regal, in my aunt they were exaggerated, giving her the melancholy air of a Modigliani. My aunt’s eyes were long and narrow, like those in Chinese fairytale books. Like mine.

“Too cold out there without sweater.”

“I’m fine, really.”

I could hear my uncle coughing in the bathroom. He’d lost his basketball bet last night.

Aunty Mabel set two mugs on the table. “Who would think Pau-yu be the first to go,” she said as we sat there sipping. “I always think it’s your uncle.”

“Daddy was older.”

“Your Uncle Richard, six different doctors he has, for all his disease. Lucky we still have insurance and disability from his job.” My aunt got up to turn off the burner under the earthenware pot.

“What is that?” I asked.

“Special Chinese medicine for his heart. We have a friend sends it from Queens.”

I remembered the potion I’d taken the year I was eight, which I’d believed to be dried blood. I never did find out what it actually was.

After breakfast my aunt drove my uncle to the cardiologist and I sat out on the patio in the sun, which had finally come out, until I felt too much like a bum. I decided to gather the rest of the grapefruit, filling two giant trash bags. Insects had begun to hum in the jungly grass. Savannah was the word that came to mind as I stood there surveying the yard for any strays I’d missed.

The next task I set for myself was to clip the grass with hedge trimmers, wearing an old sun hat I found in the garage hanging beside the tools. When I was done I went in for lemonade and the last half of the Sally Jessy Raphael show—bulimic boys, not as entertaining as you’d think, or maybe I was finally losing my taste for talk shows. By then it was around eleven-thirty and my aunt and uncle still hadn’t returned, so I went out to the garage again and got out their old rusty rotary mower, which kept jamming on me. The ground was even more hummocky than it looked. I kept a hopeful lookout for armadillos, never having seen one before, but all I came across were lots of fat flying bugs and a tortoise, which I carefully picked up and put by the back fence, behind the grapefruit trees. The pastel lady from next door was hanging out her wash and waved to me.