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were slower to move than the eyes. I had the feeling that his mouth was also unused to the exercise of smiling. Maybe he’d had a bad year, too.
    “I’ve always thought so. The past casts shadows and, worse, it leaves stains and relics to clutter up our memories—especially when we love,” he agreed. This last observation seemed a bit insane, but in the delightful way that is captured so well by British literary playwrights. “One may pack upand move the body on its way, but all those stains and emotional shadows move along with us.”
    I nodded, still bemused. The image of Ambrose Bierce preserved in old photographs had always sported a luxurious mustache that I found a bit repulsive. Fortunately, of this soup-sieve today there was no sign. Otherwise, this man really did look a great deal like Bitter Bierce. I wondered if he was an actor. I had a friend who made a good living touring in a one-man show about Mark Twain.
    “What stains are you seeing this morning?” I asked politely.
    “The smell and taste of bitter coffee sweetened with condensed milk. It goes oddly with green olives.”
    The answer was surprising. I looked down at my jar as he added: “I shared a pot of it every morning in the winter of nineteen-thirty and ’thirty-one with a woman who called herself Amorosa.”
    “What happened to her?”
    “The same thing that happens to nearly everyone.” Ambrose shook his head. “I’d have married her, but she was already dying of what they used to call consumption. I told her I could save her, but she refused me—for my own good, she said.” He smiled wryly, and I found myself fascinated with the mobility of his features. He also reminded me a bit of the actor, Jim Carrey.
    “Have you ever noticed,” he asked, “that when someone tries to do you a kindness, it is only rarely actually kind?”
    “Yes.” I naturally thought of Max, unwillingly opening the memory of his most recent “kindness” of throwing everything out from the nursery while I was still in the hospital so I wouldn’t have to “deal” with it when I came home. Was the spot too tender, too bruised to endure exploration with a stranger? I decided that it was not. Sometime in the last few days that hurt had healed. The change in geography had given me mental as well as physical distance. That was good. Experience had shown me that sometimes seemingly unrelated things are actually like plants in a garden: separate entities above, but underneath the roots have all grown together in a solid mat. Try to pull out a dandelion and you get a daffodil as well. Which is a poetic way of saying that for a long time I couldn’t think about losing Max without thinking about losing our baby. It had been impossible to look at one without thinking of the other. But the roots of that relationship had died and withered into nothing, and I could now extract Max’s memory and not pull out anything else painful with it.
    This meant I didn’t have to stop talking with this rather strange man so that I could run and have a long hard cry in my cottage. That made me happy.
    “Are you my neighbor?” I asked him, not commenting on the death of Amorosa by what they used to call consumption in 1931. Nor did I volunteer any thoughts about my own so-called stains. As a loner, if you lose an arm, a leg, an eye, people notice. Even losing a baby or a boyfriend, someone—if only your doctor or the nosy women down thehall—will comment. But lose yourself—your spirit, your will, your soul—and there is a good chance that no one will ever know. Maybe not even you. People form an opinion, an impression of what you are, and it becomes hermetically sealed in memory, resisting revision or updating, especially when we refuse to see ourselves for the flawed creatures we actually are. That was convenient. I didn’t need anyone seeing me as vulnerable until I got my psyche sorted out.
    “After a fashion,” he said. “I own the island. Or, my corporation does.