And Roland Ash stood eleven feet away holding the keys to a new car on the flat of his hand while twenty-five people looked at a set of feeler gauges.
He put the keys in his pocket about a minute later.
Nobody said anything to him. That is the thing. Nobody was rude to that man and nobody threw him out.
The party simply carried on without him in it, and he stood on the edge of it for about twenty minutes and then went.
PART 3 — THE MARCH
I did not take that car and I have never regretted it, and for about six weeks I thought that was the end of the story.
It was not, because of what had happened in the March.
Ottilie Ash died on the eleventh of March. She was eighty-one. She is Roland’s mother and she is my grandmother and I have met her four times, all before I was five.
