Otilla cooked up the water for her morning tea and opened a carton of ricotta cheese. She ate standing up, dipping cookies in and out of the cheese, walking around the enormous kitchen in tight figure eights as though she were in a gymkhana. She was eighty-one years old and childishly ravenous and hopeful with a long pigtail and a friendly unreasonable nature.

She lived with her sisters in a big house in the middle of the state of Florida. There were three of them, all older and wiser. They were educated in Northern schools and came back with queer ideas. Lavinia, the eldest, returned after four years, with a rock, off of a mountain, out of some forest. It was covered with lichen and green like a plum. Lavinia put it to the north of the seedlings on the shadowy side of the house. She tore up the grass and burnt out the salamanders and the ants and raked the sand out all around the rock in a pattern like a machine would make. The sisters watched the rock on and off for forty years until one morning when they were all out in their Mercedes automobile, taking the air, a sinkhole opened up and took the rock and half the garage down thirty-seven feet. It didn’t seem to matter to Lavinia, who had cared for the thing. Growing rocks, she said, was supposed to bring one serenity and put one on terms with oneself and she had become serene so she didn’t care. Otilla believed that such an idea could only come from a foreign religion, but she could only guess at this as no one ever told her anything except her father, and he had died long ago from drink. He was handsome and rich, having made money in railways and grapefruit. Otilla was his darling. She still had the tumbler he was drinking rum from when he died. None of father’s girls had ever married, and Otilla, who was thought to be a little slow, had not even gone off to school.

Otilla ate a deviled egg and some ice cream and drank another cup of tea. She wore sneakers and a brand new dress that still had the cardboard pinned beneath the collar. The dress had come in the mail the day before along with a plastic soap dish and three rubber pedal pads for the Mercedes. The sisters ordered everything through catalogs and seldom went to town. Upstairs, Otilla could hear them moving about.

“Louisa,” Marjorie said, “this soap dish works beautifully.”

Otilla moved to a wicker chair by the window and sat on her long pigtail. She turned off the light and turned on the fan. It was just after sunrise, the lakes all along the Ridge were smoking with heat. She could see bass shaking the surface of the water and she felt a brief and eager joy at the sight—at the morning and the mist running off the lakes and the birds rising up from the shaggy orange trees. The joy didn’t come often any more and it didn’t last long and when it passed it seemed more a part of dying than delight. She didn’t dwell on this however. For the most part, she found that as long as one commenced to get up in the morning and move one’s bowels, everything else moved along without confusing variation.

From the window, she could also see the mailbox. The flag was up and there was a package swinging from it. She couldn’t understand why the mailman hadn’t put the package inside. It was a large sturdy mailbox and would hold anything.

She got up and walked quickly outside, hoping that Lavinia wouldn’t see her, as Lavinia preferred picking up the mail herself. She passed the black Mercedes. The garage had never been rebuilt and the car had been parked for years between two oak trees. There was a quilt over the hood. Every night, Lavinia would pull a wire out of the distributor and bring it into the house. The next morning she would put the wire back in again, warm up the Mercedes and drive it twice around the circular driveway and then down a slope one hundred yards to the mailbox. They only received things that they ordered. The Mercedes was fifteen years old and had eleven thousand miles on it. Lavinia kept the car up. She was clever at it.

“This vehicle will run forever because I’ve taken good care of it,” she’d say.

Otilla stood beside the mailbox looking north up the road and then south. She had good eyesight but there wasn’t a thing to be seen. Hanging in a feed bag off the mailbox was a sleeping baby. It wore a little yellow T-shirt with a rabbit on it. The rabbit appeared to be playing a fiddle. The baby had black hair and big ears and was making small grunts and whistles in its sleep. Otilla wiped her hands on the bodice of her dress and picked the baby out of the sack. It smelled faintly of ashes and fruit.

Inside the house, the three sisters, Lavinia, Louisa, and Marjorie were setting out the breakfast things. They were ninety-two, ninety, and eighty-seven, respectively. They were in excellent color and health and didn’t look much over seventy. Each morning they’d set up the table as though they were expecting the Governor himself—good silver, best china, egg cups and bun cozy.

They settled themselves. The fan was painted with blue rustproof paint and turned right on around itself like an owl. The soft-boiled eggs wobbled when the breeze ran by them.

“Going to be a hot one,” Lavinia said.

The younger sisters nodded yes, chewing on their toast.

“The summer’s just begun and it appears it’s never going to end,” Lavinia said.

The sisters shook their heads yes. The sky was getting brighter and brighter. The three of them, along with Otilla, had lived together forever. They weren’t looking at the sky or the empty groves which they had seen before. The light was changing very fast, progressing visibly over the table top. It fell on the butter.

“They’ve been tampering with the atmosphere,” Lavinia said. “They don’t have the sense to leave things alone.” Lavinia was a strong-willed, impatient woman. She thought about what she had just said and threw her spoon down irritably at the truth of it. Lavinia was no longer serene about anything. That presumption had been for her youth, when she had time. Now everything was pesky to her and a hindrance.

“Good morning,” Otilla said. She walked to the wicker chair and sat down. The baby lay in her arms, short and squat like a loaf of bread.