Chapter 1

Questions

1. What does the narrator ask "you" at the beginning of the story?
2. What does the narrator find in the alley next to her house?
3. What does the narrator find out from Dr. Syfret earlier that day?
4. What does the narrator realize while cleaning the papers out of her desk?
5. What does the narrator do for the man when she realizes he's back in his makeshift shelter?
6. What does the man do when the narrator says he's wasting his life?
7. What does the narrator realize while she's watching TV the next day?
8. Why does the narrator say her cancer is so painful?
9. What does the homeless man suggest the narrator do with her house?
10. Where did the narrator's daughter go in 1976?
11. What task does the narrator give the homeless man?
12. Why does the narrator get mad at her cats?
13. What part of her life does the narrator talk about while driving with the homeless man?
14. What does the narrator do when she realizes that the homeless man is listening to her playing the piano?
15. What does the narrator tell her neighbor when they say they've seen a vagrant on her property?
16. Why does the narrator stop answering the phone?
17. How does the narrator picture heaven?
18. Why does the narrator worry about leaving her house in the state that it's in?
19. What did the narrator do when she got robbed three years previously?
20. How do the bars on the windows make the narrator feel?
21. What does the narrator feel when she realizes the homeless man is listening to the music outside, like she is?
22. How does the narrator feel about her soul and that of the homeless man?
23. What does the narrator show the homeless man the next time she sees him?
24. What favor does the narrator ask the homeless man for?
25. What does the narrator say when the homeless man asks if she can get someone else to send papers to her daughter?

Answers

1. If they remember the alley next to her house
2. A man sleeping in a makeshift house made of boxes of plastic sheets
3. That her cancer is terminal
4. That the man is back in his makeshift shelter by the house
5. She invites him in and makes him a sandwich.
6. Spits at her and leaves
7. That the homeless man is staring over her shoulder through the window
8. It's spread to her bones.
9. Turn it into a boarding house
10. America
11. Cutting the grass
12. For being sassy
13. Her childhood
14. Plays Bach for him as well as she can
15. The man works for her.
16. She doesn't want to speak to anyone except for her daughter and the "fat man in heaven."
17. As a big hotel lobby
18. She feels like she needs to know that someone will take over everything for her.
19. She had bars installed on her windows as a precaution against future burglaries.
20. Like an endangered animal in the zoo
21. A kind of intimacy in the fact that they're doing the same thing in the dark
22. They're somehow intertwined.
23. Photos of her daughter and grandsons
24. She wants him to send some particular papers to her daughter after she dies.
25. That she specifically wants him to do it