I took my leave of mother but I didn’t strike out for the bus station directly. I wanted to visit Janey Redhouse one more time.

I suppose you could call Janey my ex-girlfriend at that point, though I hesitate to use such a precise word for a relationship in which every moment seemed provisional, with all terms left unstated and all future acts subject to negotiation.

Janey’s father was a painter who was well-known in Toledo. She loved him but had bitterly hated attempting to grind out her murky little oil pastel drawings in his well-known-in-Toledo shadow, so had escaped to the east, hoping for anonymity. In this she had not entirely succeeded, because the Cape Cod art community was made up of refugees of all sorts, including several from the interior, and she was still sometimes asked if she was related to James Redhouse of Toledo.

“Distantly,” was her geographically-accurate reply.

The first evening I spent at her house she managed to keep her hands to herself by sitting across the kitchen table from me, compulsively sketching. Her pencil drawings were relatively free of murk, and in fact the many erasures produced a kind of angelic glow about the graven image of my face. During the time I knew her she must have produced seventy or eighty little angel-portraits of me, sometimes five or six to a page. She could have constructed an entire choir of cut-out paper angels, all looking like vacuous miniature versions of me.