No answer could have shocked me more—the idea that one day I’d leave, that Florida was not forever. At that point I had only one friend left in town, a retired accountant named Earl who lived by himself with three dogs and a roomful of opera records, but I could not imagine leaving. People are always telling you to “move on,” however, and there was my neighbor sorting photographs in preparation for a move to Maine, so when a friend in Washington called a few weeks later to ask if I would help him teach a course, I accepted the offer and made arrangements to leave town.

  The morning I left I went over to say goodbye to Mr. McAfee. I was not worried about being gone for several months; I knew he would watch the house.

  In novels—at least in nineteenth-century novels—people lock up houses, go away, travel for years, and then return. There’s something romantic about the way the manor is shut up, so that the protagonists can wander through the Far East and come home several years later, because their house, like some ancient tree, will always be there, the roof covered with leaves the oaks are shedding in the autumn sunlight. The servants rush out to greet them; the hero hears that the woman he loves is still unmarried; the plot resumes.

  I wasn’t sure if you could leave a house that way in the twenty-first century, or at any time in history outside a novel. But it seemed to me that since there was little if any crime on the street I lived on, the chances of someone breaking in were small, and with Mr. McAfee weeding across the street every day it would be like having a watchman. I could not do what Mr. McAfee was doing. Instead, the day before I flew north, I went up on the roof to take a look at everything.

  The roof was a fascinating vantage point; halfway up the five-hundred-year-old live oak around which the house had been built I could look down on the neighborhood, the yard, the dirt road that ran around the community park and the other houses, as if none of it had anything to do with me. The roof, a week after raking it, was so littered with fresh leaves, branches, and feces that it made me think of Saint Jerome’s vindictive wisecrack about the Roman temples that Christianity had emptied—temples of the gods, he wrote, “where now only bats and owls reside.” The gods had been my parents; now they were gone, and raccoon, cat, and squirrel droppings lay scattered across the tar paper. Across the street I could see my neighbor kneeling on his lawn, pulling dollarweed out under a straw hat: eternal Florida. Mr. McAfee had promised to keep an eye on the place while I was gone. So the next day I said goodbye to my neighbor and had Earl drive me to the Jacksonville airport, where I flew north to Washington to take up residence in a stranger’s house.

  Hurricane Weather

  When I met Earl I was forty-one and he was sixty-two, which is why I thought that going to the boat ramp where we met must have been for him a sort of hobby, a habit he’d developed when going to dirty movie theaters in South Florida, something he did not want to give up even in old age, not because he needed sex but because it got him out of the house—like the games of golf my father used to play until his legs would no longer support him.

  There was a real movie theater in Starke, twelve miles away, that we sometimes went to after we became friends, the old-fashioned kind with a ticket window right on the street where you bought your ticket as you stood on the sidewalk and a concession stand in the lobby where you could buy candy bars and popcorn—a theater that had inexplicably survived the age of the Cineplex and still for some reason got first-run films, though mainly those directed toward teenage boys, which meant that it was there we saw Harry Potter and some of the Batman movies whose soundtracks were so violent they shook us literally in our seats, till Earl stopped going because, he said, he found the audience so restless and noisy, which meant he’d become used to watching movies on his television by himself at home.

  Earl didn’t even have an antenna—or he had one that didn’t work well. Like so many people who have the money to replace something but stick with whatever they have, he lived for years with a set that was by no means up-to-date but transmitted a sufficient number of channels (two or three) for him to be content. His speakers and record player were state-of-the-art; he had the very best of those. But the television in front of which he spent so much time he didn’t bother to replace, though it was quite old; and it was there I used to go over in the evenings, to watch a movie or some episode of Masterpiece Theatre on Sunday nights.

  When Earl retired after three and a half decades teaching accounting at a community college in South Florida, he had so many opera records and books that he needed a house with room for them, but even after he found that, there was still not enough space on the shelves for them all. His new home was a long, low ranch house built halfway up the slope between the lake and the paved two-lane highway that goes through town. It belonged to a series of houses that had been built along the lakeshore in the forties and fifties. The town itself went back a bit further. It had been founded in the twenties by people from Pennsylvania when North Florida was still an open range on which cattle were allowed to graze wherever they wandered and most of the highways were dirt. The houses of these original settlers, small stucco cottages that remind me for some reason of Los Angeles, were so diminutive that their little porte cocheres, tiny porches, scalloped walls, and urns seemed built for people who were shorter than succeeding generations, or who at least needed far less space. Earl’s, however, was a large, modern house on what had to be at least two or three lots.

  In the yard was a grove of camellias the previous owner had planted that ran from the sidewalk down the slope to the lake, some old sago palms, several live oaks, a dogwood that grew inexplicably in the open sun, and a guest cottage separated by a brick patio from the main residence. It was a long house, which Earl used only the tips of—the kitchen on the west end, the music room on the east. The dining room between the two never held a dinner party, so far as I know. It was filled instead with waist-high stacks of books that Earl had intended to read when he retired. Next to that was a living room in which I never saw much living; as unused as a front parlor, it was furnished with antiques he’d bought or inherited from a neighbor of his in South Florida, an old woman who’d married into, or was descended from, a distinguished New England family, I forget which. She was, I gathered, one of the reasons he had left South Florida. They’d lived across a stairwell from one another for so many years that when she told him one day that she had decided to move to an assisted-living place in Lauderdale Lakes the ground shifted beneath his feet. One of those casual relationships that reveal themselves to be, when they are removed, not so casual after all was ending. In other words, the life he’d known was over; he couldn’t imagine living there without her across the breezeway, and the fact that he would now have to get used to a new neighbor seemed out of the question. They had been, he realized, married in some way—perfect neighbors—a widow and a bachelor who both loved music, books, and fine furniture. For a moment he considered moving to Lauderdale Lakes with her, but then he decided to make a break for it instead—one last chapter in another place—so he drove north, and after visiting several of the little towns that surround Gainesville, he found this one—this house, I should say, because it had enough space for his books and records and antiques.

  That was all I guess he wanted, since most of the house was rather ignored. In the living room was a fireplace that was never used, and an olive-green wall-to-wall carpet that he did not bother to replace, even though it had a few chunks missing, as if a dog had taken a bite, which made visible the vomit-colored foam rubber underneath. There was an enclosed porch that ran almost the length of the living room on the side facing the lake, but not only did he never use it, he also didn’t bother to put furniture out there; it was simply another book repository. Nor did he seem to have any interest in the lake. The only time he looked at it was when he was washing dishes in the kitchen, where the window above the sink provided a view of the water, increasingly far away as the drought that began not long after he moved here deepened.

  The one room that he did use, the room in which he spent almost all his time, had originally been I suspect the master bedroom but had been transformed by Earl into a music and movie library. The shelves covering the walls were packed with long-playing records. There were books and stacks of DVDs on the floor, and a little table at the end of the room with a big typewriter on it that he used to register the titles of his movies on small white cards that he put into a little file box in alphabetical order, a sort of cinematic card catalog. The music-and-movie room looked out onto a small wooden deck, and beyond that, the lake; but as long as I went there, I never saw Earl once open the vertical blinds that covered the sliding glass doors that led outside. It was as if Nature did not exist; only Art. There was a small room across the hall in which he’d stored the paintings he’d bought at estate sales in South Florida, and a bathroom behind the high-backed chair in which I used to sit watching TV with him, a bathroom used so rarely that the first time I went in there I should not have been surprised to find it full of dead cockroaches strewn across the tiles or lying on their backs in the bathtub, a cockroach cemetery where for some reason they all had gone to die, the way people around here all seem to take their last breath in the hospital in Gainesville, a town twenty-three miles away.

  Earl’s first years in town were as active as my parents’ when my father retired to this town in rural Florida for reasons my sister and I never understood. Like them, he took trips. One was a drive to Indiana, where he’d obtained his doctorate in accounting, another to Virginia to visit battlefields of the Civil War (the subject of so many of the books he read), another a trip to New Hampshire, where he’d spent a summer working in a hotel with his cousin when they were in college. Then there were shorter drives to South Florida to see his brother, who still lived in the town in which they’d grown up. And then the trips began to dwindle, as my parents’ had, till Earl’s itinerary shrank to visiting his cousin in Gainesville, or eating at a fish restaurant he liked in Lake City, or cruising the boat ramp in Madison six miles away. At the boat ramp he would read a book while waiting in his car for someone to drive in; even after the police tried to rid the place of homosexuals, that’s what he’d say he was doing if the officer inquired: reading. Meanwhile, because we both went to the boat ramp, we became friends.

  Most homosexuals in small towns don’t want to know each other; it threatens the closet in which they are living. The first time I realized another man in my town was gay I felt I’d run into the only other human being in the Arctic Circle, but I was soon given to understand that what we had in common was not going to be the basis of a friendship—rather the opposite. So I behaved the same way.

  With Earl it was very different—we became friends at the boat ramp immediately. Not only did we both live in the same town, but we both liked to read and listen to classical music. When I began visiting him it was like visiting one of my aunts in Ohio; he had the same dignity, the same slow-moving, slightly formal calm. The only eccentric thing about him was a habit of shaving his head once a year because he believed it encouraged hair growth. Otherwise, he was conventional. I could count on certain things when I visited Earl: a cup of tea, a musical recording, a discussion of a book, not to mention what had gone on the day before at the boat ramp. He was the only person in town with whom I felt I could be myself. Before very long we were like two women I’d known when I was still in my twenties: two widows who’d grown up in Jacksonville, gone to the same boarding school, married, lost their husbands, and retired to our little town, where they played bridge at the Women’s Club every week until one of them decided it was time to move to a nursing home, which they did in unison, because one was not about to live in this town without the other.

  That’s how I thought of the two of us—as Gertrude and Belle—especially because by the time I was going to the boat ramp I knew almost nobody else in town, even though I’d been coming and going here for almost fifty years. Everyone I knew had died or moved away. I’d only started living in the town full-time in 1983, when a fall rendered my mother an invalid. My mother said two contradictory things when I came back for good. The first she said in a completely neutral tone, as if commenting on someone she hardly knew, one afternoon as I was putting her to bed: “You’ll never leave me. Your conscience won’t let you.” The second, which came much later, betrayed her own: “I’m holding you back.” But the truth was she was holding me back from nothing at that point—and when she died years later I’d become so used to life in a small town that I could not imagine moving back to New York. So I stayed.

  And then, after my mother died, I made a vow: to remain in her house until everyone on the street who had felt sorry for her during her long period of invalidism had themselves kicked the bucket—a desire for revenge that made no sense, since her accident and subsequent paralysis were not their fault, and they had been extremely kind to her. Yet that was how I felt. The other reason was that I didn’t know how to disperse her effects—the things she’d collected living with my father in a duty-free port in the Caribbean for thirty years: the porcelain and silver, the figurines and vases, the Delft and Copenhagen and Wedgwood and Georg Jensen. A friend up north viewed both explanations with contempt. He told me there were people one could pay to dispose of such things; he told me I was staying because the property taxes were low and my parents had paid cash for the place in 1961. Whatever the reason, I could not think of a thing to say when, a week after my mother’s death, I ran into one of her friends at the post office and she exclaimed, “I thought you’d be gone the next day!” Instead, I was still here when that woman died twenty years later.

  Earl never asked why I’d stayed in town, though my friend Clark told me not long after my mother died to “get out now, while you can, and don’t look back!” The reason was simple: he, in the face of the same circumstances, had not. I met Clark in the Ambush, a bar in Gainesville I’d stop at on my way back from the nursing home after having dinner with my mother. Following dinner we would watch Jeopardy! and then I’d arrange her in bed—she didn’t want the blanket to be too close to her chin—and then go to the Ambush, where I’d spend time watching pool players who were so drunk I never understood how they could stand up, much less hit the eight ball with unerring accuracy when the moment came. Clark, like me, had lived in New York, though he’d moved to San Francisco when his mother began to fail, and he came back to Crystal River, the small town in which he’d grown up on the Gulf Coast. Now he lived in Gainesville, a big, bearded hippie who spent his days driving around North Central Florida photographing old beauty parlors and attending estate sales. Clark hadn’t gone back; he’d stayed. And yet his advice to me after my mother died was instant and heartfelt: “Get out now, while you can!”

  “Your mother didn’t expect you to watch her figurines for the rest of your life,” he said in a voice flooded with scorn. But that’s what I seemed to be doing. Clark and I, moreover, were not the only people who’d moved down to Florida to care for ailing parents and then found themselves unable to go back, people whose contact with small-town life, or inability to abandon a house that had been in the family for years, had rendered them unable to sell it even when they did go north, a house on which they continued to pay the property taxes every year, though there was nobody living in it—like the architect I met once at a party in Washington who stared into space searching for words when I asked him why he hadn’t sold his father’s house near Tampa.

  “You think you’re hanging on to something,” Clark said one day when he stopped by our house on his way to some beauty parlor in McIntosh, “but there’s nothing here—not even on this street. None of the neighbors you have now are going to stay around forever. And they’re not going to tell you when they go—you’re just going to see a ‘For Sale’ sign outside the house. One day they’ll move to North Carolina without a word. Nobody stays in Florida. You’ll be left high and dry—the way I was in Crystal River. And when you need help, what’ll you do? When you’ve had your stroke and you’re lying on the floor wishing you could crawl over to the phone to dial 911!” he said. “Those figurines aren’t going to do it for you. Thirty years from now you’ll be living alone, with nobody to rely on, certainly not the neighbors, who’ll have no idea who you are at that point. And you won’t know their names. There’s only one thing you can count on—one of these days a tiny blood vessel in your brain is going to give way when you are all by yourself!”

  There was a reason Clark’s nickname was Cassandra.

  My father’s stroke was, actually, on my mind—because most of us assume we’re going to die of whatever killed our parents. But I ignored Cassandra’s warning. I liked the idea of keeping the same post office box, the same bedroom with the same books I’d had to read in high school lined up in the headboard of my bed, in a little compartment whose sliding door I merely had to push back to pull out my well-worn paperbacks of Hamlet and The Great Gatsby. I liked never having to write the alumni magazine to say I had a new address, never having to switch banks or have to ask my dentist to forward my records to a new town. I wanted to stay in one dear, perpetual place. I wanted to watch what happened to it over Time.