The humidity in Oakhaven was the kind of humidity that made your clothes stick to you before you had done anything worth sticking to. Leland Beauregard stood on the porch of his family's mansion and watched the cicadas vibrate in the magnolia trees, their sound like a thousand tiny engines revving in unison, and thought that if the end of the world came, it would not come with fire and brimstone but with a persistent, buzzing inconvenience.

He was thirty-two years old and the last Beauregard to live in the big house on Magnolia Lane, which was to say he was the last Beauregard who could not afford to sell it. The roof leaked in three places. The floors sloped toward the kitchen like a landscape that had given up on being flat. The name meant something at country club dinners, but only in the way that a fossil means something at a beach - as evidence that something once lived here that was much larger and much more expensive than anything that exists now.

The Circle found him on a Tuesday. They came in a line of four cars that looked absurdly expensive parked in front of a house that had not been painted since the Reagan administration, and they stood on his porch in their linen suits and asked him to come to the country club and sit in a room with flickering air conditioning and listen to a proposition.

The Circle was eight families: the Beauregards (which was just Leland, but the Circle counted him for the sake of tradition), the Carters, the DuPonts, the Whitfields, the Halloways, the Montagnes, the Calloways, and the Vances. They were the old money of Oakhaven, which meant they had money that was old and increasingly small, and names that were still printed on the membership cards at clubs that had more weeds than grass.

They met at the Oakhaven Country Club, which had one air conditioner that made more noise than it did cooling, and a dining room that smelled of old grease and older ambitions. The chairman of the Circle was a man called Julian Whitfield, who had the soft hands and the easy smile of someone who had never had to do anything that required effort.

"Leland," Julian said, pouring him a glass of iced tea that was mostly ice. "We have a situation."

Leland sipped the tea. It was sweet enough to be dessert. "I'm flattered that you come to me for situations. I'm the guy whose family's name is on a street sign that nobody reads anymore."

"That's precisely why we come to you," said a woman called Beatrice Carter, who was seventy and sharp as a scalpel. "You understand what it means to be forgotten. You understand what it means to watch something you inherited slip through your fingers. These people..." She paused, choosing her words with the care of someone who was used to being obeyed. "They are accelerating the process."

"Who are?"

Julian exchanged a look with Beatrice. "Three people who moved to Oakhaven six months ago. They opened a shop on Main Street. It's a small thing - a general store, basically. But it's attracting people. Our people. People who used to work for Carter Textiles. Who used to buy from DuPont Hardware. Who used to spend their money in businesses owned by the Circle."

Leland set down his glass. "A shop is stealing your customers?"

"A shop that pays fair wages and treats people with respect is doing exactly that," Beatrice said. "We are not asking you to hurt them. We are asking you to... discourage them. To make it clear that Oakhaven has an social order, and that people who disrupt that order will find that life here becomes difficult."

Leland looked around the dining room. The air conditioner rattled like a dying animal. The wallpaper was peeling in long strips that looked like sunburned skin. The country club had a golf course that was more crabgrass than green, and a tennis court whose net had not been tightened since the nineties.

"And if I refuse?" he asked.

Julian smiled. "Leland, you live in a house with a leaking roof and a bank account that has fewer digits than your ancestors' slave count. You need this money. We all need this money. The only question is whether you need it with dignity or without it."

Leland took the job because Julian was right about the money and wrong about the dignity. There was no dignity in taking a job from people whose families had been losing money to his family's families for three generations. But there was also no dignity in refusing.

He began his investigation the next morning. He drove his rusting Ford down Main Street and parked in front of the shop and watched it.

It was a small building with a porch that had been painted blue and was now peeling to reveal the grey wood beneath. A hand-painted sign said: Reed & Company - General Store. Inside, through the window, Leland could see a man who must have been Thomas Reed, putting cans on a shelf with the careful attention of a librarian shelving books. Thomas was sixty, broad-shouldered, with white hair and kind eyes and the manner of a man who had spent his life teaching children and had not lost his capacity for wonder even though he was now surrounded by canned beans instead of chalkboards.

Across the street, Leland sat in his car and watched for two hours. He saw Thomas come out and talk to a woman who was carrying a basket of groceries. He saw her laugh at something he said, and the laugh was loud and unselfconscious, the kind of laugh that made other people look around to see what she found funny and then found something funny themselves.

"Claire Dubois," Leland said to himself. He had read the file. Claire had moved to Oakhaven from New Orleans after a marriage that had ended badly and a business that had failed even worse. She was forty, practical, and possessed of a humour that was both her defence mechanism and her weapon.

Leland continued his surveillance and found the third person. Maria Santos came out of the shop at noon with a young boy who must have been her son, and they walked to a bus stop together, the boy carrying a bag of groceries that was too heavy for his arms and Maria not saying anything but walking half a pace behind him so he would not have to adjust his grip.

Leland watched them for a week. He learned that Thomas taught free reading classes at the library on Wednesday evenings. He learned that Claire baked pies on Saturdays and that people drove from neighbouring towns to buy them, even though the pies cost more than they should. He learned that Maria worked two jobs - one at the shop and one at the post office - and still found time to organize a neighbourhood clean-up that had turned an abandoned lot into a garden.

These were not people who threatened the social order of Oakhaven. These were people who were trying to build something small and decent in a town that had forgotten how to build anything except resentment.

Leland could not do it. Not because of moral awakening - he did not feel particularly moral. He felt something worse: he felt inadequate.

He was poorer than all three of them combined. His family name was prestigious, but his bank account had three digits and a overdraft fee. Thomas had a pension and a house in Chicago that he was trying to sell. Claire had savings from her business in New Orleans, however diminished. Maria had two jobs and a son and a stubbornness that was a form of wealth in itself.

Leland had a name and a leaking roof and a deep, abiding understanding of his own absurdity.

The Circle was not pleased. They held an emergency meeting at the country club and decided that persuasion was insufficient. They would demonstrate the futility of resistance by holding a dinner party - a celebration of their resilience, their tradition, their enduring superiority.

Leland was invited because he was a Beauregard, and Beauregards were invited to Circle dinners the way fossils were invited to a museum - as decoration, as evidence of a grander past.

The dinner was held in the country club's main dining room, which had been decorated with candles that were melting faster than the air conditioner could handle the heat. The eight families arrived in their best clothes, which were increasingly best in the way that a worn tuxedo is best - it was the nicest thing you owned, even though it no longer fit and the elbows were shiny.

The food was adequate. The wine was older than some of the guests. And then came the moment that Leland would remember for the rest of his life, though he would never be able to explain it to anyone who had not been there.

Julian Whitfield stood up and announced that they would be cooking the dessert over the fireplace, because "the old ways produce the best flavours." He went to a side room and returned with a box of pre-inflation currency - bills from the 1950s and sixties that were worth more as collectibles than they had ever been as money.

He threw the first bill into the fireplace. It caught fire with a bright yellow flame and curled into ash in seconds.

Beatrice threw in a silver serving spoon. It glowed red and then black and then melted into a puddle that looked like a small, silver river.

One by one, the families threw their last valuable things into the fire. Heirloom crystal that shattered. Antique pictures that burned with a surprising intensity. A collection of first edition books that Leland recognized as the ones his own grandmother had sold to pay for her medicine in 1974.

Leland sat at the table and watched the flames consume the money and the silver and the books and the crystal, and he felt something shift inside him. Not anger. Not sadness. Something closer to clarity.

In this forgotten Southern town, in this country club with its flickering air conditioner and its crabgrass golf course, wealth had reached its ultimate expression: burning money to cook dessert. The money had no value here because the world had moved on. The highway had bypassed Oakhaven fifteen years ago, and the outside world no longer cared about the Carters or the DuPonts or the Beauregards. The only currency that mattered was the kind you could eat, or drink, or use to fix a leaking roof.

Leland looked at his hands. They were the hands of a Beauregard, but they were also just hands -五十-two years old, slightly trembling, empty.

The dinner ended at ten. The guests left, tired and warm and oddly satisfied, as if burning other people's possessions had filled some hunger they did not know they had. Leland walked home through the humid Oakhaven night, the cicadas singing their endless song, the magnolias smelling sweet and heavy in the dark.

He passed the shop on Main Street. The light was on. Through the window, he could see Thomas reading to a small group of children, Claire laughing at something one of them said, Maria helping her son with his homework at a corner table.

Leland stopped at the corner and watched for a moment. Then he continued walking home, to his leaky roof and his drafty rooms and his name that meant nothing.

But for the first time in his life, he was not ashamed of it.

He sat in his dark parlor, listening to the cicadas, with a small, involuntary smile on his face, and the humidity held the house around him like a blanket that was too heavy but was all he had.