I shushed her and tilted my head in the direction of the driver and made my voice low. “This is a small town. No need broadcasting anything that could get misinterpreted.”

A quarter of an hour later, we walked into Christ the King Baptist Church, as filthy as coal miners, and ate a meal fit for royalty. People talked about us; I know they did, but to our faces they were polite and kept pouring more fruit punch. I looked Celestial in the eye and knew that, like me, what she wanted was a vodka martini, extra dry, but we made our way through the soul-food dinner, and we didn’t leave until it was clear that Roy Senior wasn’t going to show.

It took us a while, but we found a bar where we could crash. It would have been quicker to drive thirty miles up the road to the casino, where the drinks were cheap and the bartenders heavy-handed. When I steered the car in that direction, Celestial stopped me. “Don’t go that way,” she said. “I don’t want to pass the prison.”

“That’s cool,” I said.

“Is it?” Celestial said. “It’s shameful that I can’t even look at the barbed-wire fence while he has to live behind it. Do I love him, Dre?”

I couldn’t answer her. “You married him.”

She turned toward the window, tapping her forehead against the glass. I reached in my jacket pocket and gave her my handkerchief, driving one-handed, on the lookout for a bar we could belly up to.

It’s not like there was any shortage of booze in Eloe. There were package stores and churches every hundred feet. Men stood on corners, tipping brown bags. If I didn’t find something soon, we would buy a bottle and pass it back and forth like winos.

Finally we ended up at Earl Picard’s Saturday Nighter, a joint that looked like it had been a 7-Eleven in its last incarnation. We chose two wobbly barstools and watched hot dogs ride around a red lightbulb. The windows were painted over, so although it was only two o’clock in the afternoon on the streets, it was perpetually 2 a.m. inside. Hardly anyone was there, but I guess that people with jobs were at work, and the unemployed weren’t wasting their money on liquor by the glass. When we sat down, the bartender looked up from the book she was reading with the help of a pocket flashlight.

“What can I get you?” she asked, setting down the flashlight and sending a circle of light to the ceiling.

This was not exactly a martini sort of establishment, so Celestial asked for a screwdriver and the bartender poured a good four fingers of Smirnoff into a flimsy cup before opening a can of juice. She rummaged under the counter and produced a jar of cherries, spearing them with a plastic sword.

We drank without tapping our cups together; we were so dirty that I tasted grit in my drink. “Do you think that Roy Senior is still out there with his shovel, or do you think he let the machines take over after we left?”

“He’s out there,” Celestial said. “He’s not going to let a tractor bury her.” Shaking her drink to chill it, she asked, “What about Roy? How’s he holding up?”

“He was okay, I guess. He said to tell you that he misses you.”

“You know that I love him, right, Dre? His mother never believed me.”

“Well, she didn’t know you, did she? Maybe she didn’t think anybody was good enough for her son. You know how black mamas are.”

“I want another round,” she said, and the bartender mixed more vodka and orange juice. I rooted in my pocket, fishing out some quarters. “Slow your roll, cowboy,” I told her. “Go put something on the jukebox.”

She took the money and walked to the back, unsteady, like she was walking on someone else’s legs. Her hair responded to the humidity, losing that funeral lankness and drawing up around her ears. The men sitting at the other end of the bar noticed her figure as she bent at the waist to peer into the jukebox.

“That’s your wife?” the bartender asked me, with what might have been a flirtatious flicker in her eye.

“No,” I said. “We’re old friends. We drove up from Atlanta for a funeral.”

“Oh,” she said. “Olive Hamilton?”

I nodded.

“So sad. Is she the daughter-in-law?”

I had a feeling she already knew. That little glint wasn’t anything more than small-town nosiness.

As Celestial made her way back to me, the bartender retreated like she was embarrassed. Suddenly Prince sang out of the jukebox, “I wanna be your lover.” I said to her, “Remember in the eighth grade? When we thought Prince was saying ‘I want to be the only one you cook for’?”

Celestial said, “I never thought that.”

“You knew what ‘come’ was? In the eighth grade?”

“I guess I knew it was something.”

We didn’t talk for a while. She pounded cheap vodka and I switched to beer and then to Sprite.

“She hit me,” Celestial said, rattling the ice in her cup. “Roy’s mother. When I stayed away too long. Next time she saw me, she slapped the tar out of me. We were having dinner at the casino and she waited until Gloria got up to go to the bathroom and she reached over and pow.” Celestial clapped her hands. “Right across my face. Tears came to my eyes and she said, ‘Listen here, little girl, if I don’t get to cry, nobody cries. I have suffered more just this morning than you have in your whole life.’ ”

“What?” I said, touching her cheek. “What the hell was that all about?”

“It was about everything. Olive slapped all the tears right out of me.” Then she covered my hand on her cheek with her own. “All through the services, except when I was singing, my face was on fire. Right here.” She rubbed my hand over the soft place. Then she turned her head and kissed my palm.

“Celestial,” I said. “You are so drunk, baby girl.”

“I’m not,” she said, reaching again for my hand. “Well, I am. But I’m still me.”

“Stop it.” I pulled my hand back. “People in here have figured out who we are.” I gave her a stern look with my head cocked to the side.

“Oh yeah,” she said. “Small town.”

I nodded as her face fell a little. “Microscopic.”

Now the Isley Brothers were on the jukebox. There was something about those vintage, slow jams. Those old cats sang about a kind of devotion long since out of style. “I always liked this song,” I told her.

“You know why?” Celestial said. “It’s because this is the music we were conceived to. It speaks to you on a primal level.”

“I prefer not to imagine my conception.”

She was a little mopey now as she twirled the ice cube with her fingernail that was chewed down to the meat. “Dre, I’m so tired of this. Of all of this. This dirty little town. I’m tired of having in-laws. And prison. Prison isn’t supposed to be part of my life. I was married a year and half—that’s it. Roy got snatched up and my daddy was still writing checks to pay for my wedding.”

“I never got used to you as a Mrs. Hamilton.” I signaled for the check and asked for two glasses of ice water.

She rolled her eyes. “When you went to see him, did he seem mad at me? When I went last, he said he didn’t like my vibe, that I was coming out of obligation.” She set her glass down. “He wasn’t wrong, but what was I supposed to do? I work crazy hours at the shop, then I drive for hours to get to Louisiana and spend the night with his parents, who don’t really even like me. Then I go through …” She fluttered her fingers. “Go through everything, and he doesn’t think my smile is cheery enough? This isn’t what I signed up for.”

She was serious, but I laughed anyway. “I didn’t know there was a sign-up sheet. That’s not how it works.”

“You can laugh,” she said with angry eyes. “You know how I feel when I’m here? Black and desperate. You don’t know what it’s like to be standing in the line to get in to see him.”

“I do,” I said. “I was there yesterday.”

“It’s different for women. They treat you like you’re coming to visit your pimp. Every single one of them smiles with a little smirk like you should know better. Like you’re a delusional victim. If you try to fix yourself up and look respectable, it’s worse in way. They treat you like you’re an idiot because its clear you could do better if you weren’t such a fucking fool.” She popped her fingers to the music like she was trying to snap herself out of the spell of feelings coming over her, but she was buzzed enough that her emotions weren’t hers to control.

Had we been alone, I would have touched her, but under the eyes of the bartender and the three other men present, I didn’t lift my hands. I just said, “Let’s go.”

When we got back to the hotel, it was light out, but the casino parking lot was full. Apparently a ten-car giveaway was scheduled for this evening. When we were safe behind the doors of the elevator, I faced her. She fastened her arms around my torso, reminding me of our childhood when she used to hug the breath out of me. She smelled like vodka but also like lavender and pine trees. I held her until we reached the fifth floor, even as the doors opened revealing a family patiently waiting to get on board.

“Newlyweds,” the mother explained.

We stepped out of the elevator and stood facing the hall leading to our rooms.

“Everyone thought we would get married one day,” she said.

“You’re drunk,” I said. “Way drunk.”

“I disagree.” She made her way to her room and slid the key into the door. Tiny green lights twinkled. “I’m something, but I’m not drunk. Come in? Do you want to?”

“Celestial,” I said, though I felt myself leaning in her direction like someone tipped the world. “It’s me, Dre.” She laughed and it sounded playful like we hadn’t watched Roy’s daddy bury his wife with an old-fashioned spade. She laughed like this was a time before anything bad had ever happened.

“It’s me, too,” she said with a grin. “Celestial.”

I tried to laugh back, but no sound came. Besides, any laugh would be fake, and I never faked anything when it came to her.

It was all over when I stepped over the threshold and heard the door click shut behind me. We didn’t fall into each other’s arms like in a movie, with furious deep kissing and groping. For the first slow moments, we just looked at each other, like what we had chosen was a package that we couldn’t quite figure how to open. She sat on the bed and I did, too, and it reminded me of the other time when we crossed the line, in high school. Then, like now, we were dressed up and frazzled. Back then we had been in the dark basement, yet I could make out the outlines of the ruffles of her party dress. But now we were in the full light. Her hair swelled around her head in a dark halo; both our mouths were hot with alcohol and our clothes stained with graveyard soil.

I moved closer to her and wound my fingers in her thick hair. “We’ve always been together,” she told me. “Not like this. But always.”

I nodded. “I want to be the only one you cook for.”

We laughed, a real laugh, a shared laugh. This is when our life changed. We came to each other with joy on our lips. What came next may not have been legally binding; there was no clergyman or witness. But it was ours.