The Progress of Love

going to the senior citizens’ club to play cards. Then, just when the hot months were starting and you’d think she would most enjoy getting out, she announced to Dane that she didn’t intend to drive anymore.
    He thought the trouble might be with her eyesight. He suggested an appointment to see if she needed stronger glasses.
    “I see well enough,” she said. “My trouble is not being sure of what I see.”
    What did she mean by that?
    “I see things I know aren’t there.”
    How did she know they were not there?
    “Because I still have enough sense that I can tell. My brain gets the message through and tells me that’s ridiculous. But what if it doesn’t get through all the time? How am I going to know? I can get my groceries delivered. Most old people get their groceries delivered. I am an old person. They are not going to miss me that much at the A.&P.”
    But Dane knew how much she enjoyed going to the A.&P., and he thought that he or Theo would have to try to get her there once a week. That was where she got the special strong coffee that Wyck had drunk, and she usually liked to look at the smoked meats and back bacon—both favorite things of Wyck’s—though she seldom bought any.
    “For instance,” said Violet. “The other morning, I saw King Billy.”
    “You saw my granddaddy?” Dane said, laughing. “Well. How was he?”
    “I saw King Billy the horse,” said Violet shortly. “I came out of my room and there he was poking his head in at the dining-room window.”
    She said she had known him right away. His familiar, foolish, dapple-gray head. She told him to go on, get out of there, and he lifted his head over the sill and moved off in a leisurely kind of way. Violet went on into the kitchen to start her breakfast, and then several things occurred to her.
    King Billy the horse had been dead for about sixty-five years.
    That couldn’t have been the milkman’s horse, either, because milkmen hadn’t driven horses since around 1950. They drove trucks.
    No. They didn’t drive anything, because milk was not delivered anymore. It didn’t even come in bottles. You picked it up at the store in cartons or in plastic bags.
    There was glass in the dining-room window that had not been broken.
    “I was never especially fond of that horse, either,” said Violet. “I was never un-fond of it, but if I had my choice of anything or anyone I wanted to see that’s gone, it wouldn’t be that horse.”
    “What would it be?” said Dane, trying to keep the conversation on a light level, though he wasn’t at all happy about what he heard. “What would be your choice?”
    But Violet made an unpleasant sound—a balky sort of grunt, annhh —as if his question angered and exasperated her. A look of deliberate, even ill-natured stupidity—the visual equivalent of that grunt—passed over her face.
    It happened that a few nights later Dane was watching a televisionprogram about people in South America—mostly women—who believe themselves to be invaded and possessed, from time to time and in special circumstances, by spirits. The look on their faces reminded him of that look on Violet’s. The difference was that they courted this possession, and he was sure Violet didn’t. Nothing in her wanted to be overtaken by a helpless and distracted, dull and stubborn old woman, with a memory or imagination out of control, bulging at random through the present scene. Trying to keep that old woman in check was bound to make her short-tempered. In fact, he had seen her—now he remembered, he had seen her tilt her head to the side and give it a quick slap, as people do to get rid of a buzzing, unwelcome presence.
    A week or so further into the summer, she phoned him. “Dane. Did I tell you about this pair I see, going by my house?”
    “Pair of what, Aunt Violet?”
    “Girls. I think so. Boys don’t have long hair anymore, do they? They’re dressed in army clothes, it looks like, but I don’t know whether that means anything. One is short and one is tall. I see them go by this house and look at it. They walk out the road and back.”
    “Maybe they’re collecting bottles. People do.”
    “They don’t have anything to put bottles in. It’s this house. They have some interest in it.”
    “Aunt Violet? Are you sure?”
    “Yes, I know, I ask myself, too. But they’re not anybody I’ve ever known. They’re not anybody I know that’s dead. That’s something.”
    He thought he should get around to