Mrs. Flores,” he said like someone in an old movie, when she opened the door. Mrs. Flores, as if he were saying good day. Perhaps she’d let him in and have him do something, instead of just sit and watch her TV. It was all he did up in Willa’s apartment. And then he came to down to Mrs. Flores’s apartment and did the same thing.

She watched morning news shows, and fluff shows, where they demonstrated how to make easy meals for one, or simple crafts. Justin followed her into the living room and flipped to a movie channel and settled on whatever appeared. Together they watched murder scenes, sex scenes, and gun fights. He stared, unmoved by all of it.

“I told you to call me René,” she said.

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

He didn’t answer.

“I could use your help with something,” she said, and pointed to a pile of her husband’s golf magazines that she’d been keeping for no reason. His fingerprints were on the pages, that was all. It meant nothing to have fingerprints. They were invisible.

She handed Justin twine and asked him to tie the stack, as well as the newspapers and other periodicals she’d never gotten around to reading, and he lugged them to the curb. When he came back, she had him stand on a chair and brush off the dust strands and cobwebs where the ceiling met the wall. He really was a tall person. He kept the healed wound on his neck covered.

“Can I stay for a little longer? Vacuum or something?” He reminded her so much of the little boys who used to live in the neighborhood and would come around during the winter and ask to clear the driveway.

“If you do all the cleaning,” she said. “I’ll have none to do myself and I’ll sit in a chair and die.”

René had always cared too much about what went on in other people’s houses and minds. For years after her retirement, she went through a period of adjustment during which she couldn’t stop gazing out the window at all the wrong occurring on this street with frustration and helplessness. She’d been a social worker, walking into neighborhoods not far from here, knocking on doors and invading the lives of people who did not want to see her, who feared she would be instrumental in taking their children away.

Justin had asked to stay with her, and though she’d offered him a place here weeks ago, she’d had plenty of time to think about it. Of course, it had flown out of her mouth when she talked to her daughter Brianna on the phone, and Brianna made her promise she would not let Justin into the house again. A grown man, not a child. A grown man who had wielded a knife and cut his own throat. But no, René explained, Justin wasn’t dangerous. Still, she’d promised Brianna he wouldn’t stay.

She couldn’t help him. And he did nothing for her except make noise in another room when otherwise there would have been silence. Without them discussing it, he would fall asleep on the couch and she would cover him with a blanket.

• •

René’s heart was failing. Brianna visited most evenings after work, and René made sure Justin was gone by then. After Brianna left, she was alone. Night terrified her. René piled pillows behind her head, because when she lay flat, fluid gurgled into her throat and she awoke with the sensation that she was drowning, and her heart pounded, and she focused too much on its beating. This kept her awake for a long time.

In the dark, she heard Justin upstairs. Also awake.

“I don’t sleep anymore,” he’d told her. “I think I’m so tired that I want to sleep too much, and you can’t have the thing you want too much.”

“When you fall asleep on my couch, you are adequately asleep.”

She didn’t try to sleep tonight. In the musty chair in the living room, she put the TV on, the volume low so she wouldn’t bother Willa, who worked so hard. The people in the TV screen busied themselves, disappeared and morphed into new people. Around midnight, there was a knock on the door.

“I had to listen really hard, but I heard your TV,” Justin said.

“Take off those boots if you’re going to put your feet on my couch,” she said.

He bent to untie his boots and left them by the door. She found his youth attractive, but he wasn’t handsome. She liked more clean-cut types. Brianna’s father had been breathtaking when she met him, and as he aged, he developed a new kind of beauty. He grew a mustache and kept his hair neatly parted to the right. His skin darkened slightly, so he resembled photographs of his father in Mexico in the 1930s.

Justin didn’t stay up chatting. He climbed onto the couch fully clothed and slept with one of her fleece blankets wrapped around himself. During a commercial, she watched him. What a development, this man on her couch. Dressed like a big teenager in black jeans. She didn’t have a son, and didn’t want Justin to be hers, but if he were her son, she’d be worried, possibly ashamed that he had ended up on her couch. At a respectable hour, she went into the yard to check on the flowers. She’d forgotten to water. There’d been no rain for weeks, and with Justin in her hair, she’d forgotten. But that was cruel. He wasn’t in her hair. He occupied space in her mind, which wasn’t a terrible thing. Oh, it wasn’t his fault the flowers died.

Just as she was thinking of him, he appeared from behind her. He moved carefully, not yet fully awake.

“I should have said something.” He crouched to inspect the violas and pansies. “I kept walking by them and I was afraid to say something. I thought maybe you wanted to kill them.”

“Why would anyone want that?”

He pulled them out and tossed the yellowed and twisted corpses onto the grass. René had never been any good at growing things, but she kept trying it, either flooding her plants to death or forgetting them altogether. Some things you never get any better at.