My grandmother, Stella, lived in the screened porch off our living room. At ten I still thought of it as the screened porch, though it had been bricked up for almost two years, ever since she came to live with us in Maryland. She added a pink-tiled bathroom, with rug and towels and toilet cover to match. Her Mustang was pink, too. She’d driven it all the way from California after divorcing her third husband. Her first husband, our grandfather, died long before my brothers and I were born. The second, whom she divorced to marry the third, had kept their silver Karmann Ghia after a bitter property struggle. This time, whatever else she had lost, she got the car. It sat in our driveway, between the station wagon and the Ford van, exotic as an orchid. Stella washed it every Saturday, unhooking the hose from the sprinkler our father had set up. The five of us kneeled on the living room couch and watched her through the big picture window, fascinated by the way she sprayed and soaped and rubbed each speck of grime until it disappeared. We imagined we felt the cold splash of water on our shoulder blades, the dirty yellow chamois wiping us clean of all our sins: Our grandmother was a person who inspired awe and fear, the oldest and most unnerving phenomenon my brothers and I had yet encountered.