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detected in the letter she received in response to her query. I am afraid the dear woman cannot accept the fact that her husband was drowned, along with his friends, when their small charter plane fell into the sea several years ago.
      We may be able to help one another, you and I. Of course, I know nothing about you, except for what you’ve said in the newspaper along with the sympathetic nature my mother-in-law detected in your letter, but I wish to encourage you to telephone me at the number below so that we may speak of this “adoption” matter—by which I assume you mean a sort of barter relationship whereby you would apply yourself to helping our son with his high school courses in exchange for comfortable (and private) room and board.
      I shall tell you briefly of our situation here. My husband is a dentist. We live in a pleasant neighbourhood of large lots with plenty of trees. There is a small self-contained cottage at the back of our property where you may cook your own meals if you wish. Or, if you prefer, you could cross the yard to eat with us. This is something we can discuss. Our son is a fine soccer player and a keen budding actor whose dedication to both sport and drama has resulted in unsatisfactory grades at school. He has promised to co-operate with a private tutor so long as we don’t require him to quit the soccer team. We seem to have come to a firm agreement on this—that he will not be required to drop soccer so long as his work with a tutor results in improved grades.
      I suspect I will be too late, having received your advertisement only now, and that you will already have found a good home and position elsewhere. If this is the situation, I can only hope that it works out well for you, and that you will be happy there.
Sincerely,
Audrey L. Montana
    This was precisely the response he had imagined when he sent out his advertisement! Upon reading the letter a second time he saw that it was a real offer, that in its incomprehensible generosity the world out there had sent him a reply he might have invented for himself.
    But this happy recognition was joined too quickly by a disquiet that was almost dread, raising cold goosebumps down his arms. Here was an opportunity to do what he needed to do— escape from the dangerous isolation of this place on the very terms he had hoped for—but he knew already that he would not respond to this woman’s offer. He must have been mistaken, he must have been hoping for something he hadn’t identified. Perhaps he shouldn’t have used the word “tutor.” Preparing someone for government exams was not teaching so much as nagging, drilling, anticipating, and of course pretending that the exam had something to do with education. He could think of any number of reasons to stay clear of this Audrey Montana. As he replaced the sheet of paper to its envelope and tapped it gently along with Alan Doyle’s letter into the space between his mother’s Bible and I’m Not Stiller , he told himself that even in his seventies a man could wish for a future that offered more than what he had briefly devised for himself.

4
    Since he could not bring himself to accept even the perfect response to his ad, he saw no harm in allowing Lisa Svetic to know the nature of the advertisement that had resulted in all those letters crossing her counter. She was, or said she was, appalled. “This is far more dangerous than a mail-order bride! A family of lunatics could’ve decided to get themselves a servant for the dirty jobs they don’t want to do for themselves. They’d lock you up at night so you couldn’t escape.” While tidying up a shelf of canned soup, she outlined a situation where he would be walking into a house filled with young monsters who would make his life a misery by playing tricks on him. “They’ll hide your books, bust your