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wake particularly messy. Still, Miss Beryl wouldn’t have given a nickel for a fastidious man, and she didn’t mind cleaning up after Sully each morning. He provided her a small task, and her days had few enough of these. “Lordy,” Miss Beryl said. “Sneak up on an old woman.”
    â€œI thought you were talking to me, Mrs. Peoples,” Sully told her. He was the only person she knew who called her “missus,” and the gesture reserved for him a special place in Miss Beryl’s heart. “I just thought I’d stop in to make sure you didn’t die in your sleep.”
    â€œNot yet,” she told him.
    â€œYou’re talking to yourself, though,” he pointed out, “so it can’t be long.”
    â€œI wasn’t talking to myself. I was talking to Ed,” Miss Beryl informed her tenant, indicating Ed on the wall.
    â€œOh,” Sully said, feigning relief. “And here I thought you were going batty.”
    He sat down heavily on Miss Beryl’s Queen Anne chair, causing her to wince. The chair was delicate, a gift from Clive Sr., who had bought it for her at an antique shop in Schuyler Springs. She had talked him into buying it, actually. Clive Sr. had thought it too fragile, with its slender curved legs and arms. A large man, he’d pointed out that if he ever sat in it, “the damn thing” would probably collapse and run him through. “It wasn’t my intention for you to sit in it, ever,” Miss Beryl had informed him. “In fact, it wasn’t my intention for anyone to sit in it.” Clive Sr. had frowned at this intelligence and opened his mouth to say the obvious—that it didn’t make a lot of sense to buy a chair nobody was going to sit in—when he noticed the expression on his beloved’s face and shut his mouth. Like many men addicted to sports, Clive Sr. was also a religious man and one who’d been raised to accept life’s mysteries—the BlessedTrinity, for one instance, a woman’s reasoning, for another. Also, he remembered just in time that Miss Beryl had made him a present, just that winter, of what she referred to as the world’s ugliest corduroy recliner, the very one he had his heart set on. To Clive Sr.’s way of thinking, there was nothing ugly about the chair, and it was certainly more substantial, with its solid construction and foam padding and sturdy fabric, than this pile of skinny mahogany sticks, but he guessed that he was had, and he wrote out the check.
    Both had been correct, Miss Beryl now reflected. The corduroy recliner, safely out of sight in the spare bedroom,
was
the ugliest chair in the world, and the Queen Anne
was
fragile. She hated for anyone, much less Sully, to sit in it. There were many rudimentary concepts that eluded her tenant, and pride of ownership was among these. Sully himself owned nothing that he placed any value on, and it always seemed inexplicable to him that people worried about harm coming to their possessions. His existence had always been so full of breakage that he viewed it as one of life’s constants and no more worth worrying about than the weather. Once, years ago, Miss Beryl had broached this touchy subject with Sully, tried to indicate those special things among her possessions that she would hate to see broken, but the discussion appeared to either bore or annoy him, so she’d given up. She could, of course, ask him not to sit in this one particular chair, but the request would just irritate him and he wouldn’t stop in for a while until he forgot what she’d done to irritate him, and when he returned he’d go right back to the same chair.
    So Miss Beryl decided to risk the chair. She enjoyed her tenant’s stopping by in the morning “to see if she was dead yet” because she’d always been fond of Sully and understood his fondness for her as well. Affection wasn’t the sort of thing men like