Roy

Memory is a queer creature, an eccentric curator. I still look back on that night, although not as often as I once did. How long can you live with your face twisted over your shoulder? No matter what people may say, this was not a failure to remember. I’m not sure it is a failure at all.

When I say that I visit the Piney Woods Inn in my waking dreams, I’m not being defensive. It’s merely the truth. Like Aretha said, A woman’s only human… . She’s flesh and blood, just like her man. No more, no less.

My regret is how hard we argued that night, over his parents, of all things. We had fought harder even before we married, when we were playing at love, but those were tussles about our relationship. At the Piney Woods, we tangled about history, and there is no fair fight to be waged about the past. Knowing something I didn’t, Roy called out “November 17,” stopping time. When he left with the ice bucket, I was glad for him to go.

I called Andre, and after three rings he picked up and talked me down, sane and civil as always. “Ease up on Roy,” he said. “If you lose it every time he tries to come clean, you’re encouraging him to lie.”

“But,” I said, not ready to let go. “He didn’t even—”

“You know I’m right,” he said without being smug. “But what you don’t know is that I’m entertaining a young lady this evening.”

“Pardon moi,” I said, happy for him.

“Gigolos get lonely, too,” he said.

I was still grinning when I hung up the phone.

And I was still smiling when Roy appeared at the door with the ice bucket extended in his arms like a bouquet of roses, and by then my anger had cooled like a forgotten cup of coffee.

“Georgia, I’m sorry,” he said, taking the drink from my hand. “This has been burning a hole in my pocket. Think how I feel. You have this perfect family. Your father is a millionaire.”

“He didn’t always have money,” I said, something that I seemed to say at least once a week. Before my father sold his orange juice solution to Minute Maid, we were like any other family in Cascade Heights, what the rest of America thinks of as middle-middle class and what black America calls upper-middle class. No maid. No private school. No trust fund. Just two parents, each with two degrees and, between them, two decent jobs.

“Well, as long as I’ve known you, you have been a rich man’s daughter.”

“A million dollars doesn’t make you rich-rich,” I said. “Real rich people don’t have to earn their money.”

“Rich-rich, nouveau rich, nigger rich—any kind of rich looks rich from where I’m sitting. There is no way I was going to roll up on your father in his mansion and tell him that I’ve never met my daddy.”

He took a step toward me and I moved toward him.

“It’s not a mansion,” I said, making my voice soft. “And I told you, my daddy is literally the son of a sharecropper. An Alabama sharecropper at that.”

These conversations always caught me off guard, although after a year I should have been accustomed to this fraught song and dance. My mother cautioned me before I got married that Roy and I were from two separate realities. She said that I would constantly have to reassure him that we were, in fact, “equally yoked.” Amused by her language, I shared this with Roy, along with a joke about pulling a plow, but he didn’t even crack a smile.

“Celestial, your daddy ain’t sharing no crops now. And what about your mom? I wasn’t going to have her seeing Olive as a teenage mother, left by the side of the road. No way was I going to set my mama up like that.”

I closed the space between us, resting my hands on his head, feeling the curve of his scalp. “Look,” I said with my lips near his ears. “We’re not blackface Leave It to Beaver. You know my mother is Daddy’s second wife.”

“Is that supposed to be some kind of shocker?”

“That’s because you don’t know the whole story.” I took a breath and pushed the words out fast before I could think too much more about them. “My parents got together before Daddy was divorced.”

“You saying they were separated … or?”

“I’m saying that my mother was his mistress. For a long time. I think like three years or so. My mother was a June bride at the courthouse because her pastor wouldn’t perform the ceremony.” I have seen the photos. Gloria wears an off-white suit and a veiled pillbox hat. My father looks young and excited. There is no indication of anything but effortless devotion in their smiles. There is no evidence of me, but I’m in the frame, too, hiding behind her yellow chrysanthemum bouquet.

“Damn,” he said with a low whistle. “I didn’t think Mr. D had it in him. I didn’t think Gloria—”

“Don’t talk about my mama,” I said. “You don’t talk about mine, and I won’t talk about yours.”

“I’m not holding anything against Gloria, like I know you wouldn’t hold anything against Olive, right?”

“There’s something to hold against my daddy. Gloria says that he didn’t tell her he was married until they had been dating a whole month.”

She explained this to me when I was eighteen, when I was leaving Howard University after a messy love affair. Helping me seal cardboard cartons, my mother had said, “Love is the enemy of sound judgment, and occasionally this is in service of the good. Did you know that your father had certain obligations when we met?” I think of this as the first time my mother had ever spoken to me as one woman to another. Wordlessly, we swore each other to secrecy, and until now, I had never betrayed her confidence.

“A month, that’s not a lot of time. She could have walked away,” Roy said. “That is, if she wanted to.”

“She didn’t want to,” I said. “According to Gloria, by then she was irreversibly in love.” As I told this to Roy, I imitated my mother in the tone she used in public, elocution-class crisp, not the shaky register in which she had shared this detail.

“What?” Roy said. “Irreversibly? The warranty was up after thirty days and she couldn’t send him back?”

“Gloria said that looking back on it, she’s glad he didn’t tell her because she never would have gone out with a married man and Daddy turned out to be the One.”

“I can get that, in a way.” Roy raised my hand to his lips. “Sometimes when you like where you end up, you don’t care how you got there.”

“No,” I said. “The journey matters. Let my mama tell it. My daddy lied to her for her own good. I never want to feel grateful about being deceived.”

“Fair enough,” he said. “But think about it 2.0. If your daddy didn’t hide his situation, you wouldn’t be here. And if you weren’t here, where would I be?”

“I still don’t like it. I want us to be on the up-and-up. I don’t want our kid to inherit all of our secrets.”

Roy pumped his fist in the air. “Did you hear yourself?”

“What?”

“You said ‘our kid.’ ”

“Roy, stop being silly. Listen to what I’m trying to say.”

“Don’t try and take it back. You said ‘our kid.’ ”

“Roy,” I said. “I’m for real. No more secrets, okay? If you got anything else, spill it.”

“I got nothing.”

And with that, we reconciled, as we had so many times before. There is a song about that, too: Break up to make up, that’s all we do. Did I imagine that this was our pattern for all time? That we would grow old together, accusing and forgiving? Back then, I didn’t know what forever looked like. Maybe I don’t even know now. But that night in the Piney Woods, I believed that our marriage was a fine-spun tapestry, fragile but fixable. We tore it often and mended it, always with a silken thread, lovely but sure to give way.

We climbed into the small bed, a little buzzed from our jerry-rigged cocktails. Agreeing that the bedspread was suspect, we kicked it to the floor and lay facing each other. Lying there, tracing his brow bone with my fingers, I thought of my parents and even Roy’s. Their marriages were cut from less refined but more durable cloth, something like cotton-sack burlap, bound with gray twine. How superior Roy and I felt that night in this rented room of our own, enjoying the braid of our affection. I am ashamed at the memory and the hot blood heats my face, even if I’m only dreaming.

Then, I didn’t know that our bodies can know things before they happen, so when my eyes suddenly filled with tears, I thought this was the unpredictable effect of emotion. It washed over me sometimes when I was browsing fabric stores or preparing a meal—I would think about Roy, his bowlegged walk or the time he wrestled a robber to the ground, costing him a precious front tooth. When memory tapped me, I let go a few tears, no matter where I was, blaming it on allergies or an eyelash gone rogue. So when my emotion filled my eyes and closed my throat on that night in Eloe, I thought it was passion rather than premonition.

When we planned the trip, I’d thought we’d be staying at his mother’s, so I didn’t pack lingerie. Instead, I wore a white slip, which would have to do for our game of undressing. Roy smiled and said he loved me. His voice caught, like whatever had taken hold of me had grabbed him, too. As silly as we were, young as we were, we thought it was merely desire. This thing we enjoyed in abundance.

So there we were, not sleeping yet spent, occupying some in-between restful affection state, full of possibility. I sat up in bed next to him, inhaling the odors of the day—river mud, the musk of hotel soap, and then the scent of him, the marker of his personal chemistry, and then my own. It’s a fragrance that burrowed into the fibers of our sheets. I eased close to him and kissed his shut lids. I was thinking that I was lucky. I didn’t mean that I was lucky in the way that single women made me feel when they reminded me how fortunate I was to find a marrying man these days, and not lucky in the way of magazine features lamenting how few “good” black men there were remaining, providing a bullet-point litany of the ineligible—dead, gay, in jail, married to white women. Yes, I was fortunate by all those measures, but in my marriage to Roy, I felt blessed in the old-fashioned sense, in the way that anyone would be in finding someone whose smell you enjoyed.

Did we love so forcefully that night because we knew or because we didn’t? Was there an alarm from the future, a furious bell without its clapper? Did this hopeless bell manage to generate a breeze, causing me to reach to the floor to find my slip and use it to cover myself? Did some subtle warning cause Roy to turn and pin me to his side with his heavy arm? In his sleep, he mumbled something but did not wake.

Did I want a child? Did I lie in bed that night imagining an eager clump of cells dividing and then dividing again until I was somebody’s mother and Roy was somebody’s daddy, and Big Roy, Olive, and my parents were somebody’s grandparents? I did wonder what was going on inside my body, but I won’t say what I hoped for. Is motherhood really optional when you’re a perfectly normal woman married to a perfectly normal man? When I was in college, I took on a volunteer position at a literacy organization and tutored teen mothers. It was hard work and tended to be disheartening, as the young women seldom earned their diplomas. My supervisor said to me over espresso and croissants, “Have a baby and save the race!” He was smiling, but he wasn’t kidding. “If girls like this are having all the kids, and girls like you stay childless and fancy-free, what’s going to happen to us as a people?” Without thinking, I promised to do my part.

This is not to say that I didn’t want to be a mother. It’s not to say that I did. This is only to say that I was certain that the check would come due.

So while Roy slept with confidence, I closed my eyes with trepidation. I was still awake when the door burst open. I know they kicked it in, but the written report says that a front-desk clerk handed over the key and the door was opened in a civilized manner. But who knows what is true? I remember my husband asleep in our room while a woman six years older than his mother says she slept lightly in room 206, worried because the door didn’t seem quite secure. She told herself she was being paranoid but couldn’t convince her eyes to stay closed. Before midnight, a man twisted the knob, knowing that he could. It was dark, but she believed she recognized Roy, the man she met at the ice machine. The man who told her he had been fighting with his wife. She said that this was not her first time finding herself at the mercy of a man, but it would be the last. Roy, she said, may be smart, and he may have learned by watching TV how to cover his tracks, but he couldn’t erase her memory.

But she couldn’t erase mine either. Roy was with me all night. She doesn’t know who hurt her, but I know who I married.

I married Roy Othaniel Hamilton, whom I met for the first time when I was in college. Our connection wasn’t immediate. He considered himself a playboy in those days, and even at age nineteen, I was not one to play with. I’d come to Spelman as a transfer student after the one-year disaster at Howard University in DC. So much for me leaving home. My mother, an alumna herself, insisted that this was where I would cultivate new, bone-deep friendships, but I stuck close with Andre, who was literally the boy next door. We had been close since we were three months old, bathing together in the kitchen sink.

Andre was the one who introduced me to Roy, although it wasn’t quite on purpose. They had been next-door neighbors in Thurman Hall, on the far side of campus. I often stayed nights in Andre’s room, strictly platonic, although no one believed us. He slept atop the covers, while I huddled under the blankets. None of it makes sense now, but this is how Dre and I always were.

Before Roy and I were properly introduced, a sex-breathy voice on the other side of the wall pronounced his whole name. Roy. Othaniel. Hamilton.

Andre said, “You think he asked her to say that?”

I snorted. “Othaniel?”

“Doesn’t strike me as a spontaneous utterance.”

We giggled as the twin bed thumped against the wall. “I think she’s faking it.”

“If she is,” Andre said, “then they all are.”

I didn’t meet Roy in person for another month.

Again, I was in Andre’s room. Roy came by at 10 a.m., trying to hustle up some change to do his laundry. He came in without the courtesy of a knock.

“Oh, excuse me, ma’am,” Roy said in a way that sounded like a surprised question.

“My sister,” Andre said.

“Play sister?” Roy wanted to know, sizing up the dynamic.

“If you want to know who I am, ask me.” I must have looked a sight, wearing Andre’s maroon-and-white T-shirt and my hair tucked beneath a satin bonnet, but I had to speak up for myself.

“Okay, who are you?”

“Celestial Davenport.”

“I’m Roy Hamilton.”

“Roy Othaniel Hamilton, from what I hear through the wall.”

After that, he and I stared at each other, waiting for a cue to show us what type of story this was going to be. Finally, he looked away and asked Andre for a case quarter. I flipped over on my stomach, bent my knees, and crossed my legs at the ankle.

“You something else,” Roy said.

When Roy was gone, Andre said, “You know that Gomer Pyle thing is an act.”

“Clearly,” I said. Something about him was dangerous, and after my experience at Howard, I wanted no part of danger.

I suppose it wasn’t our time because I didn’t speak with or even think about Roy Othaniel Hamilton again for another four years, when college felt like a photo album memory from another era. When we reconnected, it wasn’t that he was so different. It’s just that what felt like peril then now morphed into something that I labeled “realness,” something for which I developed a bottomless appetite.

But what is real? Was it our uneventful first impression? Or the day in New York, of all places, where we found each other once again? Or did things “get real” when we married, or was it the day that the prosecutor in a little nowhere town declared Roy to be a flight risk? The state declared that though he may have roots in Louisiana, his home was in Atlanta, so he was held without bond or bail. At this pronouncement, Roy spat out a caustic laugh. “So now roots are irrelevant?”

Our lawyer, friend of my family but paid handsomely just the same, promised me that I wasn’t going to lose my man. Uncle Banks made motions, filed papers, and objected. But still, Roy slept behind bars one hundred nights before he was brought to trial. For one month, I remained in Louisiana, living with my in-laws, sleeping in the room that could have saved us this trouble. I waited and I sewed. I called Andre. I called my parents. When I sent the mayor his doll, I couldn’t bring myself to seal the flaps on the sturdy cardboard box. Big Roy did it for me and the memory of ripping tape troubled my sleep that night and many nights to come.

“If this doesn’t go the way we want it to,” Roy said the day before his trial, “I don’t want you to wait for me. Keep making your dolls and doing what you need to do.”

“This is going to work out,” I promised. “You didn’t do it.”

“I’m looking at so much time. I can’t ask you to throw your life away for me.” His words and his eyes were speaking two different languages, like someone saying no while nodding his head yes.

“No one is going to throw anything away,” I said.

I had faith in those days. I believed in things.

Andre showed up for us. He had been a witness at our wedding and a character witness at trial. Dre let me cut his hair, handing me the scissors to saw through the dreads he had been growing for the last four years. At our wedding, they had been rebellious little nubs, but when I cut them off they were finally responding to gravity, pointing toward his collar. When I was done, he walked his fingers through the choppy curls that remained.

The next day we took our seats in the courtroom, costumed to seem as innocent as possible. My parents were there, and Roy’s, too. Olive was dressed for church, and Big Roy sat beside her looking poor-but-honest. Like Andre, my own father groomed himself, and he, for once, appeared to be “equally yoked” to my elegant mother. Watching Roy, I could see he was an obvious match for us. It wasn’t just the cut of his coat or the break of his hem against the fine leather of his shoes; it was his face, shaven clean, and his eyes, innocent and afraid, unaccustomed to being at the mercy of the state.

The time in the county jail shrank him; the boyish chub of his cheek was gone, revealing a squared-off jaw that I didn’t know he had. Strangely enough, the leanness made him look more powerful than wasted. The only thing that gave him away as a man on trial, rather than a man on his way to work, was his poor fingers. He’d chewed his nails down to the soft meat and started in on his cuticles. Sweet Roy. The only thing that my good man ever hurt was his own hands.

What I know is this: they didn’t believe me. Twelve people and not one of them took me at my word. There in front of the room, I explained Roy couldn’t have raped the woman in room 206 because we had been together. I told them about the Magic Fingers that wouldn’t work, about the movie that played on the snowy television. The prosecutor asked me what we had been fighting about. Rattled, I looked to Roy and to both our mothers. Banks objected, so I didn’t have to answer, but the pause made it appear that I was concealing something rotten at the pit of our very young marriage. Even before I stepped down from the witness stand, I knew that I had failed him. Maybe I wasn’t appealing enough. Not dramatic enough. Too not-from-around-here. Who knows? Uncle Banks, coaching me, said, “Now is not the time to be articulate. Now is the time to give it up. No filter, all heart. No matter what you’re asked, what you want the jury to see is why you married him.”

I tried, but I didn’t know how to be anything other than “well spoken” in front of strangers. I wish I could have brought a selection of my art, the Man Moving series, all images of Roy—the marble, the dolls, and a few watercolors. I would say, “This is who he is to me. Isn’t he beautiful? Isn’t he gentle?” But all I had were words, which are as light and flimsy as air. As I took my seat beside Andre, not even the black lady juror would look at me.

It turns out that I watch too much television. I was expecting a scientist to come and testify about DNA. I was looking for a pair of good-looking detectives to burst into the courtroom at the last minute, whispering something urgent to the prosecutor. Everyone would see that this was a big mistake, a major misunderstanding. We would all be shaken but appeased. I fully believed that I would leave the courtroom with my husband beside me. Secure in our home, we would tell people how no black man is really safe in America.

Twelve years is what they gave him. We would be forty-three years old when he was released. I couldn’t even imagine myself at such an age. Roy understood that twelve years was an eternity because he sobbed right there at the defendants’ table. His knees gave way, and he fell into his chair. The judge paused and demanded that Roy bear this news on his feet. He stood again and cried, not like a baby, but in the way that only a grown man can cry, from the bottom of his feet up through his torso and finally through his mouth. When a man wails like that you know it’s all the tears that he was never allowed to shed, from Little League disappointment to teenage heartbreak, all the way to whatever injured his spirit just last year.

As Roy howled, my fingers kept worrying a rough patch of skin beneath my chin, a souvenir of scar tissue. When they did what I remember as kicking in the door, what everyone else remembers as opening it with a plastic key, after the door was opened, however it was opened, we were both pulled from the bed. They dragged Roy into the parking lot, and I followed, lunging for him, wearing nothing but the white slip. Somebody pushed me to the ground and my chin hit the pavement. My slip rode up showing my everything to everyone as my tooth sank into the soft of my bottom lip. Roy was on the asphalt beside me, barely beyond my grasp, speaking words that didn’t reach my ears. I don’t know how long we lay there, parallel like burial plots. Husband. Wife. What God has brought together, let no man tear asunder.

Andre

At the time, I was a newlywed, combing rice from my hair. Eighteen months in, I danced the line between wife and bride.

Marriage is like grafting a limb onto a tree trunk. You have the limb, freshly sliced, dripping sap, and smelling of springtime, and then you have the mother tree stripped of her protective bark, gouged and ready to receive this new addition. Some years ago, my father performed this surgery on a dogwood tree in the side yard. He tied a pink-blooming limb stolen from the woods to my mother’s white-blooming tree secured from a nursery lot. It took yards of burlap and twine and two years for the plants to join. Even now, all these years later, there’s something not quite natural about the tree, even in its amazing two-tone glory.

In my marriage, I never determined which of us was rootstock and which the grafted branch. The baby we were trying for might have rendered this irrelevant. Three takes you from being a couple to being a family, upping the consequences for walking away, upping the pleasure quotient for staying home. It wasn’t as calculated as all of that at the time. The chilly rationale of hindsight is what exposes the how and why of something that once seemed supernatural. It’s the magician’s manual that shows you how the tricks are done, not with sorcery but with careful cues and mysterious devices.

This is not an excuse, just an explanation.

I woke up on the morning of Thanksgiving beside Andre, wearing his ring. I never imagined myself to be the kind of woman who would find herself with both a husband and a fiancé. It didn’t have to happen this way. I could have asked Uncle Banks to draw up divorce papers the instant I knew that I couldn’t be a prisoner’s wife. In the wake of Olive’s funeral, I knew I wanted Andre, sweet Dre, who had been there all along. Why didn’t I set this thing right on paper? Did some dormant love for Roy sleep inside me? For two years, that was the question in Andre’s eyes, just before bed. It is the question just beneath the words in Roy’s letter, like he wrote it down, erased it, and scribbled over it.

There are many reasons. Guilt seeps in through the cracks in my logic. How could I serve him with the divorce papers, subjecting him to yet another state decree, another devastating development? It seemed gratuitous to make official what he certainly already knew. Was I being kind, or was I just weak? A year ago, I asked this of my mother, who offered me a glass of cold water and assured me that everything works for the good.

I placed my hand on Andre’s sleeping shoulder, cupping my fingers over his birthmark. He breathed deeply, trusting that the world would keep spinning until he had gotten his rest. Life was less daunting at five in the morning when only one of us was awake. Andre had grown into a handsome man. His long and lanky solidified into slim but strong. He was still leonine, with his sandy hair and reddish complexion, now like a lion full grown and not just an adorable cub. “You two are going to have some pretty babies,” strangers said to us from time to time. We smiled. It was a compliment, but thinking of babies raised a knot in my throat that threatened my air.

Jolted by a dream, Andre caught my hand with his, so I rested against him a while longer. Today was Thanksgiving. One of the hurdles of adulthood is when holidays become measuring sticks against which you always fall short. For children, Thanksgiving is about turkey and Christmas is about presents. Grown up, you learn that all holidays are about family, and few can win there.

How would my mother, the dreamy romantic, interpret this ring on my finger, deep red like an autumn leaf? According to the ruby, Andre is my fiancé, but Roy’s diamond, so white that it’s blue, insists that this is impossible. But who listens to the wisdom of jewelry? Only our bodies know the truth. Bones don’t lie. What else hides in my jewelry box? A small tooth, ivory like antique lace, with a serrated edge like a steak knife.

Everyone in Southwest Atlanta knows my parents’ house. It’s a landmark of a sort, although no plaque marks the spot. Situated at the junction of Lynhurst Drive and Cascade Road, right before Childress Street, the grand Victorian stood abandoned for almost a half century before my father rescued it from the squirrels and chipmunks. Set back from the street, partially hidden by a green wall of unkempt shrubbery, it stood like a turn-of-the-century cautionary tale in this community of tidy brick houses. When I was little, we passed it on our way to Greenbriar Mall, and Daddy used to say, “We’re going to live right there. That monster was built after the war, a consolation prize for losing Tara.” When I was very small, I took him seriously and pleaded against it: “But it’s haunted!” “Yes little lady,” he said. “Haunted by the ghost of history!” At this point my mother would intervene. “Your father is being rhetorical.” Then Daddy might say, “No. I’m being prescient.” And Gloria would say, “Prescient? Try delusional? Or maybe optimistic. But stop it. You’re scaring Celestial.”

And Daddy did stop it, until his money came in. After that, he rekindled his fascination with the crumbling mansion on the hill with its cupolas and stained glass. Uncle Banks discovered that the property was in the hands of the old-money family who had owned it since Reconstruction. They couldn’t bear to live in it since Southwest Atlanta had become all black, but they couldn’t bear to sell it either. Or at least they couldn’t until Franklin Delano Davenport showed up three generations later with a briefcase full of cash money handcuffed to his arm. Daddy says that he knew that a cashier’s check would do, but sometimes it was all worth it for the gesture.

Gloria didn’t think that the white folks would relent, but she knew better than anyone that her husband was capable of hitting a long shot. Who would have thought that he, a high school chemistry teacher, would land upon a discovery that would make them comfortable, as she likes to put it. When he returned sans briefcase, she discarded the brochures for modern stucco manses just outside the perimeter and started researching contractors that specialized in historic renovations. She says she is happier here, anyway, on the fringe of the old neighborhood, a community of schoolteachers, family doctors, and other salary-and-benefits jobs that were put into play by the civil rights movement. In one of the swanky subdivisions farther west, her neighbors were likely to have been rappers, plastic surgeons, or marketing executives. For his part, Daddy says he’s glad not to be under the thumb of some homeowners’ association that would try to tell him what he could and couldn’t do with his own damn house.

Daddy is headstrong and persistent; these qualities are the key to his unlikely success. For twenty years he retreated to his basement laboratory tinkering with compounds after long days of teaching high school. Most of my childhood memories of him involve him wearing a lab coat ornamented with a mishmash of vintage slogan buttons. “free angela!” “silence is consent!” “i AM a man!” Daddy let his afro thrive, wild and uncontrolled, even after “black is beautiful” mellowed into “black is just fine.” Few women would have hung in with this sort of unkempt, dreamer husband, and never mind the peculiar odors that floated up from downstairs, but Gloria encouraged Daddy’s experiments. She, too, worked all day, but she found time to fill out his patent applications and mail them in. When he is asked how he went from being a barefoot boy from Sunflower, Alabama, to the mad-scientist millionaire he is today, he explains that he was too ornery to fail.

I never imagined that he would ever turn his inflexible nature against me and Dre. After all, Dre had been my father’s first choice. Roy, with his aspirations raw and pink like the skin underneath a scab, made my father like him as a person but not as a husband for me. “I bet he showers in a coat and tie,” my father said. “I respect his ambition; I had mine. But you don’t want to spend the rest of your life with a man who has something to prove.” For Dre, on the other hand, Daddy had nothing but fondness. “Give ole Andre a chance,” he said every so often, all the way up until the morning of my engagement party. When I insisted that we were like brother and sister, Daddy said, “Ain’t nobody your sister but your sister.” When he was on the wrong side of a fifth of Jack Black, he said, “Me and your mama, we came at our marriage the hard way. But you don’t have to be smacked around by circumstance in order to live your life. Consider Andre. You know what he’s about. He’s already part of the family. Take the easy way for once.”

But now it was all he could do to greet Dre with a curt nod hello.

Thanksgiving morning, Andre and I arrived at my parents’ home light-handed, bearing little more than the news of our new commitment and Roy’s upcoming release. I had promised two desserts—German chocolate cake for my father and chess pie for my mother, but I was too shaken to bake. Sweets are curious, temperamental, and moody. Any cake mixed by hand on this day would slump in the oven, refusing to rise.

We found my father out front struggling with his Christmas decorations. With so much acreage, he had space enough to properly express the full scope of his holiday spirit. His T-shirt was on backward, so only in atlanta ran across his narrow back as he squatted in the middle of the vast green yard, using a straight razor to open three cardboard boxes of wise men.

“Remember those shirts?” Dre said as we inched up the steep driveway.

I did remember. Only in Atlanta was one of Roy’s many entrepreneurial ventures. He hoped it would be like a southern version of the I Love New York craze that made somebody somewhere extremely wealthy. Roy had only gotten as far as ordering a few T-shirts and key chains before he was taken away. “He always had a plan,” I said.

“Yeah. He did,” Dre said, turning to me. “You okay?”

“I’m good,” I said. “What about you?’

“I’m ready. But I can’t lie. Sometimes I feel guilty as hell for just being able to live my life.”

I didn’t have to tell him that I understood, because he knew that I did. There should be a word for this, the way it feels to steal something that’s already yours.

We watched my father for a couple of minutes, gathering ourselves to perform holiday cheer. From each box, Daddy extracted Balthazar—the swarthy wise man—and stuffed the others back where they came from. What he planned for the six discarded white kings, I had no idea. Awaiting his attention were a crèche, two blow-up snowmen, and a family of grazing deer covered in lights. On the porch was Uncle Banks, halfway up a ladder, situating what looked like dripping icicles.

“Y’all,” I said, throwing my arms wide and embracing the entire scene.

“Celestial,” Daddy said, not ignoring Dre but not acknowledging him either. “You bake me a cake?”

“Hey, Mr. Davenport,” Dre said, pretending to be welcome. “Happy Thanksgiving! You know we weren’t going to come over here with our arms swinging on the holiday! I brought you some Glenlivet.”

My father jutted his chin in my direction, and I leaned in and kissed his cheek. He smelled like cocoa butter and cannabis. He finally extended his hand to Andre, who accepted it with an optimistic face. “Happy Thanksgiving, Andre.”

“Daddy,” I whispered, “be kinder.” Then I took Dre’s hand, the one not holding the bottle, and we walked toward the front porch, which wrapped around the entire house. Before we made it to the doorway, my father called, “Thank you, Andre, for the libation. We’ll sit down with it after dinner.”

“Yes, sir,” Andre said, pleased.

Uncle Banks was ahead of us on the porch, untangling a clump of lights.

“Hey, Uncle Banks,” I said, hugging his legs on the ladder.

“Hey, baby girl,” said my uncle. “And how are you, my man?” he said to Dre.

Just then Aunt Sylvia popped her head out the front door. My earliest memory of Sylvia was when she and Banks first started dating and they took me to the Omni for ice skating. As a souvenir, she bought me a pale yellow candle, set into a wineglass. My mother confiscated it immediately. “You can’t give a child fire!” But Sylvia pleaded with my mother on my behalf. “Celestial won’t light it, will you?” I shook my head no, and my mother paused. “Trust her,” Sylvia said to Gloria, but her attention was on me. For my wedding, she walked the aisle before me, beaming as matron of honor, although technically she wasn’t a married woman.

“Celestial and Andre! I am so glad you made it. Your mother wouldn’t put the rolls in the oven until you got here.” Angling her face toward Andre, she said, “Give me some sugar, nephew.”

She pulled the door wide and Dre followed her in. I hung behind and stood at the base of the ladder. “Uncle Banks?”

“No,” he said, reading my mind. “I didn’t tell anybody but Sylvia. It’s your call about breaking it to your folks.”

“I want to thank you,” I said. “You didn’t give up.”

“No, I did not. Those peckerwoods didn’t know what hit them.” Wearing his Sunday shoes, Uncle Banks took several careful steps down the ladder and landed on the porch beside me. “Your daddy is my oldest friend. We came to Atlanta in ’58 without a penny between us. I’m more loyal to him than to my own brothers. But I want you to know that I don’t agree with him on everything. As an attorney, I have seen it all, so I have some perspective. Frank, on some topics, he has the same ideas he was born with. But he treasures you, Celestial. You have all these people loving you—your daddy, Andre, Roy. Try to think of it as a high-class problem.”

Dinner was served on the heavy oak table, which was covered with a lace cloth to hide years of everyday use. While everything else in my parents’ meticulously renovated dream home was lovely and polished, this table had a story to tell. It was a wedding gift from my grandmother, one of a few my parents received after their courthouse wedding. “You will pass this on to your children and their children,” she had said. When the movers delivered it to the house, Gloria said, “Be careful. That table is my mother’s blessing.”

Only at holidays did my father reveal his training as a preacher’s son. “O Lord,” he boomed, and we all bowed our heads. I took Daddy’s hand on my left side and Andre’s on my right. “We are gathered here to give thanks for all the blessings you have heaped upon us. We thank you for this food and the table upon which it rests. We thank you for freedom. We pray for those behind bars tonight who cannot enjoy the balm and succor of family.” Then he recited from memory a lengthy scripture.

Before we could all say “Amen,” Andre spoke. “And we thank you for one another.”

My mother raised her bowed head. “Amen to that.”

Immediately, the room came to life with a pleasant racket. My father sliced through the turkey with the electric carving knife, which resembled a chain saw in miniature, as Gloria served iced tea from a gleaming pitcher. Banks and Sylvia sat at their places, as calm as a pretty day, but I was convinced that under the table Banks’s hand rested on Sylvia’s thigh. It was quite a tableau, the room stuffed with flowers as candles burned in the candelabras. I took a lemony sip of iced tea from a heavy glass, which reminded me of Olive. She adored crystal and bought her goblets one at a time. I wondered what happened to all her things after she passed, since she never had a daughter to bless with her approval or glassware. I bowed my head and said a prayer for her. May heaven be filled with elegant objects. Then I whispered to the air, “Please forgive me.”

I shifted my eyes to my mother, hoping that she would grace me with at least a smile. Gloria is outrageously beautiful. I used to warn Roy not to see my mother as a guarantee on my future looks, although I share many of her features. We are both tall, deep brown, large-eyed, and full-lipped. She is Gloria Celeste and I am Celestial Gloriana. When I was a girl, she often kissed my forehead and called me her “love child.”

I heaped my plate, but I was unable to eat. The secrets blocked my throat like a tumor. Anytime I said anything other than Roy will be out before Christmas, and Andre and I are getting married, it was a lie, no matter how true. Across the table, Uncle Banks cut his food but didn’t have much appetite either. I was overcome with tenderness for my sweet uncle. He had done his best, and for all these years, until now, his best hadn’t been enough. He deserved to be able to share the news with his friends. He deserved thanks and honest congratulations.

I felt Gloria studying me. I gazed at her with a question on my lips and she gave me a subtle nod, like she knew what she couldn’t know.

Dessert was blackberry jam cake, a recipe passed to my mother from hers. To have a cake ready to serve on Thanksgiving, you have to bake it on the last day of summer, douse it in rum and seal it away when the fireflies are still thick on the breeze. This dessert figures into my parents’ courtship. Gloria, at the time teaching social studies, offered a crumbling slice to the new chemistry teacher. “I was bewitched!” he claims to this very day.

Gloria placed the cake on the table and the aroma of rum, cloves, and cinnamon rose to meet me. I looked up at her over my shoulder and she said, quietly, “Whatever it is, you know I’ll always be your mother.” I turned my eyes to my plate, to the cake centered on the paper doily and to the tiny spoon balanced on the rim. It reminded me of our rehearsal dinner. Roy asked for my mother’s specialty as his groom’s cake. As everyone else ate duck and drank cava, Gloria pulled me outside the restaurant. Standing in the parking lot, beside a fragrant gardenia bush, she pulled me close. “I’m happy today because you’re happy. Not because you’re getting married. I don’t care about all the top-shelf details. All I care about is you.” And this was my mother’s blessing. I hoped that she would extend it once more.

I turned to Andre, who radiated confident excitement. Then I glanced at Uncle Banks, who was deep into a murmured conversation with Sylvia. Finally I faced my father. For so many years I was Daddy’s girl, his little Ladybug. When I married Roy, I wore ballerina flats, not so I would be shorter than Roy but so I wouldn’t tower over my father. Even though I insisted that the pastor omit the word obey, for Daddy’s sake we kept the line “who gives this woman” so he could say “I do” in his surprisingly deep voice.

At the table, when I lifted my glass, only a splash of tea remained. “I would like to make a toast.” Five glasses rose as if on their own accord. “To Uncle Banks, whose tireless efforts have borne fruit. Roy will be released from prison before Christmas.”

Sylvia let out a sweet cheer and pushed her glass forward through the silent air, hoping that someone would clang theirs against it. Uncle Banks said, “Thank you.” My mother said, “Won’t He do it!” And my father said nothing.

Andre pushed back from the table. Tall and narrow, he stood like a lighthouse. “Everyone, I’ve asked Celestial to marry me.”

Roy and I announced our engagement at this same table, much in the same way, but our news had been greeted with Bordeaux and applause. This time, my father turned to me. “And what,” he asked mildly, “did you say, Ladybug?”

I stood beside Andre. “Daddy, I said yes.” I tried to make my words decisive, but I could hear the question in it, the need.

“We can work this out,” my mother said with her eyes on my father. “We can talk it through.”

Andre circled his arm around my shoulder and I felt myself breathing deep, calming breaths even as water burned my eyes. There was comfort in the truth, no matter how difficult.

My father set his dry glass beside his untouched cake. “It’s not right,” he said casually. “Ladybug, I can’t cosign this one. You can’t marry Andre if you already have a husband. I’m willing to take responsibility for my part in this. I indulged you since you were a little girl, so you think every day is supposed to be the weekend. But this is reality. You can’t always get what you want.”

“Daddy,” I said. “You should know more than anybody that love doesn’t always obey the rule book. When you and Mama got married—”

“Celestial.” Gloria wore an expression I couldn’t decipher, a warning in a foreign tongue.

Daddy broke in. “Entirely different scenario. When I met Gloria, there were extenuating circumstances. I was in a marriage that I rushed into too young. Your mother is my soulmate and helpmeet. Water always finds its own level.”

“Mr. Davenport,” said Andre. “Celestial is that for me. She is the one I want forever.”

“Son,” my father said, gripping the dessert spoon like a pitchfork. “I have one thing to say to you, as a black man: Roy is a hostage of the state. He is a victim of America. The least you could do is unhand his wife when he gets back.”

“Mr. Davenport, with all due respect—”

“What’s all this Mr. Davenport this, Mr. Davenport that. This ain’t complicated. You want this man to come home after five years in the state penitentiary for some bullshit he didn’t even do, and you want him to come back and see his wife with your little ring on her finger and you talking about you love her? I’ll tell you what Roy is going to see: he is going to see a wife who wouldn’t keep her legs closed and a so-called friend who doesn’t know what it is to be a man, let alone a black man.”

My mother was on her feet now. “Franklin, apologize.”

Andre said, “Mr. Davenport, do you hear yourself? Hate me all you want. I came here hoping for your blessing, but I don’t need it. But Celestial is your daughter. You can’t say things like that about her.”

“Don’t cuss me, Daddy,” I said. “Please don’t cuss me.”

Uncle Banks didn’t rise, but he projected a calm authority. “You had to see this coming. Franklin, what do you want the girl to do?”

“I want her to be the girl we raised her to be.”

Gloria said, “I raised her to know her own mind.”

My father attached his hands to the sides of his head like he was trying to secure it on his neck. “What is all this stuff about love and her own mind? I don’t mean to be harsh, but this is bigger than any little romance. She had her whole life to lay up with Andre if that’s what she wanted to do. But that juncture has passed. What did Roy do to deserve any of this? He didn’t do anything but be a black man in the wrong place at the wrong time. This is basic.”

There was no easy comeback to this accusation. Andre and I were still standing, stranded in the crowded room. My father dug his spoon into the jam cake, self-satisfied, I could tell, with his performance, enjoying having spoken the last word.

Across the table, Sylvia whispered to Uncle Banks, her earrings tiny mirrors catching the light. Harnessing her nerve, she took an audible breath and spoke in a rush. “Technically, I’m not part of this family, but I’ve been here long enough. Y’all are way out of line. Every single one of you. First off, we need to take at least a minute to give Banks a round of applause. He worked like an animal these last five years. All anybody else did was write checks and pray. Banks was the one who got it done. He’s the one who was fighting city hall.”

We all mumbled embarrassed thanks, which Uncle Banks accepted with a charitable nod. Then he reached for Sylvia’s hand, a signal for her to stand down. But she didn’t.

“Now, Franklin.” She cocked her head toward the head of the table. “You didn’t ask my opinion, but I am giving it anyway. Look, Celestial already has to choose between Andre and Roy. Don’t add your weight to this. Don’t force Gloria to choose between her daughter and her husband, because you can’t win that. Don’t make your daughter feel like she got to lay with who you want her to lay with, like you’re some kind of pimp. That’s street fighting, Franklin, and you know it.”

In the short/long weeks between when I got news that I was leaving until I actually left, Walter hardly slept at all, talking through the night, 1,001 life lessons for the recently unincarcerated. “Remember,” he said, “your woman has been in the world this whole time.”

“You don’t know her,” I said. “How are you going to tell me what she’s been doing?”

He said, “I can’t tell you what I don’t know—which is what she has been up to. I have no idea, and neither do you. The only thing I know for sure is that everyone else’s life has moved forward, just not yours.”

According to him, the key is to wipe your mind clean. The future is what I should think about. But he never explained how I was supposed to not pine for what I used to have. Walter didn’t understand because there is nothing behind him but missed opportunities and regret. For him, the chance to start anew would be a reprieve, but for me it would be the mother of all setbacks.

Until they slapped a twelve-year sentence on me, I had hit everything I aimed for: a job that more than paid the bills, a four-bedroom house with a big lawn I cut myself on Sundays, and a wife who lifted me up like a prayer. My job was good, but in a couple of years, I would look for a better one. Our place on Lynn Valley Road was a starter house. Next on the agenda was children. It takes being together to another level when you go to bed for a purpose larger than your own feelings. Even after what happened next, I’ll never forget that night and all our sweaty intentions.

“Walter, you tell me to forget what I had and to focus my mind on what I want going forward, but for me, it’s the same thing.”

“Hmm,” he said, buckling his face like he was thinking some deep Ghetto Yoda thoughts. “Well, somebody in your situation needs to look at life like a newborn baby. Pretend like you have never been in the world before and you’re waiting for it to show you what’s what. Keep your head in the right now.”

I surveyed my pitiful surroundings. “You can’t tell me to live in the present when the past was so much better.”

He clucked his tongue. “You know what you have right now? Right now you have to clean that sink.”

Even in prison where everything is upside down, I could see how weird it was—him giving me chores. My Biological threw a small sponge at me and I caught it. “It’s your turn,” I told him, tossing it back.

“Fathers don’t have a turn,” he said, batting it back in my direction.

I rubbed a little bar of soap against the yellow sponge and started wiping down the sink, which wasn’t really that dirty.

“Country Yoda,” I said.

“Watch your mouth.”

What Walter didn’t tell me was that innocent or not, I wouldn’t be allowed to leave through the front door, a modest expectation from a man who should have known better than to expect much. Banks warned me not to look for any kind of formal apology, no envelope outfitted with the state seal. Hell, I didn’t even know the names of the officials I should have demanded this apology from. I wasn’t getting any restitution other than the twenty-three sorry dollars that everybody gets when they walk out of the Louisiana State Penitentiary. But was it unreasonable for me to think that I, as an innocent man, having paid somebody else’s debt to society, would be allowed to exit through the front door? I pictured myself making my way down a big marble stairway with the sun shining on my face, entering a little grassy lawn where my whole family would be waiting for me, even though Olive was two years dead and Celestial was two years gone. Big Roy would be there. This much, I could take to the bank. But for true, only a woman can truly welcome a man back home, wash his feet, and fix his plate.

Knowing that I wasn’t walking out anyone’s front door, my father waited in the back parking lot, leaning on the hood of his Chrysler. I walked toward him, and Big Roy straightened his collar and ran his palm over his hair. As I shielded my eyes against the late afternoon sun, his face broke into a smile.

A dozen of us were released that day. For a young cat, no more than twenty, a family waited with metallic balloons shaped like Christmas ornaments; a little boy wearing a red rubber nose squeezed the bulb on a bicycle horn, somehow causing the nose to glow. Another dude didn’t have anybody. He didn’t look left or right but walked straight to the gray van that would carry him to the bus station, as though pulled by a leash. All the rest were picked up by women: some mamas, others wives or girlfriends. The ladies drove to the gate but made sure to let the man take the wheel as they left. I was the last one out the door on that bright winter day. My shoes felt foreign on my feet—leather wingtips. My dress socks got lost somewhere, so I settled my feet in the shoes raw. The texture of the asphalt was rough beneath the leather soles as I walked to my father. Father, what a clumsy word now, as I approached Big Roy, afraid to want anything at all. Not that I would ask for much. When I was in high school, too old for Roy to punish me for cutting up, the way boys do, he would say, “Listen here, boy, get yourself arrested, don’t call me. I’m not into prodigals. I don’t do welcome-back parties.” But that was when we thought incarceration had something to do with being guilty or at least being stupid.

If anybody deserved a party, it was me, the other son, the one that didn’t get the fatted calf. Or Job. Or Esau or any of the many people in the Bible left hanging. When I went to fill a bucket with ice on that fateful night, every smart decision I’d made suddenly became irrelevant.

Somebody raped that woman—that was clear from her shaky fingers twitching in her lap—but not me. I remember feeling tender toward her when I met her that night at the ice machine. I told her that she reminded me of my mother and she said she always wanted a son. Walking to her room, I spilled my guts, telling her about my stupid fight with Celestial, and she promised to light a candle for me.

At the trial, I was a little sorry for her as she marched her way through her awful story, ruining my life. She spoke carefully, as though she memorized her statement, using textbook terms to describe her own body and what had been done to it. She stared at me in the courtroom with a mouth quivering with fear but also with hurt and rage. In her mind, I was the one who did it, just after she prayed for me and for my marriage and the baby we were trying for. When they asked her if she was sure, she said she would know me anywhere.

Sometimes I wonder if she would know me now. Would anybody who knew me then recognize me today? Innocent or not, prison changes you, makes you into a convict. Striding across the parking lot, I actually shook my head like a wet dog to get these thoughts out of my mind. I reminded myself that the point was that I was walking out the door. Front door, back door. Same difference.

So this is me. A free man, as they say. Don’t nobody care about shiny balloons, cognac, or fatted calves.

Big Roy didn’t rise from his place leaning on the fender and run across the lot to meet me. He watched me approach, and when I was in striking distance, he opened up his arms and pulled me in. I was thirty-six years old. I knew I had a lot of years left, but I couldn’t stop counting those I’d forfeited. I bit down on my lip and tasted the hot flavor of my own blood as I rested there, feeling the weight and safety of my father’s arms. “Good to see you, son,” and I enjoyed the feel of the word, for the truth in it.

“You, too,” I said.

“You’re early,” he said.

I couldn’t help but smile at that. I didn’t even know what part of early he was talking about. Was he talking about the five-day bump-up that was announced three days ago? Then, of course, there was the fact that I got away with putting in less than half of a twelve-year bid. So I said, “You the one who taught me that five minutes early is late.”

He smiled, too. “Glad to know you were listening.”

“My whole life.”

We settled into the Chrysler, the same car he drove when I went in. “Want to go visit Olive? I haven’t been there today yet.”

“No,” I said, because I wasn’t ready to confront the rectangle of land with my mother’s name scraped deep into cold marble. The only “her” I wanted to see was Celestial, but she was in Atlanta, 507 highway miles away, and she didn’t even know yet that I was free.

Big Roy let his shoulders fall. “I suppose it’s all right. Olive ain’t going nowhere.”

I believe he meant it in an offhand way, but the words burrowed in deep. “No, she’s not,” I said.

We drove the next mile or so quietly. To the right, the casino’s neon lights competed with the sunshine and won. Cars ant-hilled around, looking for parking. Up ahead, a highway patrol car’s nose stuck out from a stand of bushes, speed trap, the same as always.

“So when you going to see her?”

This time her was Celestial. “In a couple of days.”

“She know you coming?”

“Yeah. I sent a letter. But she didn’t hear that the date was moved up.”

“How would she hear it if you didn’t tell her?”

I didn’t really have much to say back but the truth. “Let me get my constitution straight first.”

Big Roy nodded. “You know for sure she still your wife?”

“She didn’t divorce me,” I said. “That’s got to mean something.”

Big Roy said, “She’s doing well for herself.”

I nodded. “In a way, I guess.” I almost added that an artist can only be so famous in America, but I didn’t want to sound jealous or petty. I added, “I’m real proud of her.”

My daddy didn’t look up from the road. “I haven’t seen Celestial since your mama’s funeral, with your friend Andre. It was good to see her there.”

I nodded again.

“That was two years ago, actually a little more. No sign of her since.”

“Me either, but she put money on my account,” I said. “Every month.”

“That’s something,” Big Roy said. “I won’t disrespect that. When I get home, I’ll show you the magazine with her picture.”

“I already saw it,” I said. Posing with a pair of dolls that look like her parents, Celestial smiles like she never suffered a day in her life. I read the article three times. Twice silently and once aloud to Walter, who conceded that the article didn’t mention me, but he also observed that there was no mention of another man either. Still, I was in no hurry to see the magazine again. “They have a subscription to Ebony, the jail does. Jet, Black Enterprise. The whole trifecta.”

“Is that racist?” Big Roy asked.

“Maybe a little.” I laughed. “My cell mate liked to read Essence. He would fan the magazine and say, ‘There are a lot of women out there in need of a man!’ He was an older cat. Walter was his name. He looked out for me.” An emotion I hadn’t booked on shook my words.

“He did?” Big Roy lifted his hand from the steering wheel like he was going to adjust the rearview, but then he scratched his own chin and set his hand back on the wheel. “That’s a blessing. A small blessing.” The light changed, but Big Roy hesitated. Behind us, cars beeped their horns, but timidly, like they didn’t mean to interrupt. “I’m glad for anything or anybody that helped to get you home alive, son.”

The drive to Eloe was only about forty-five minutes, plenty of time for a man to get things off his chest, but I didn’t share any of the news that had been bouncing off the walls of my skull for the last three years. I told myself that the story wasn’t like a carton of milk; it wouldn’t go bad if I kept it to myself a little longer. The truth would remain true for a week, for a month, for a year, ten years, however long it was before I felt like talking to Big Roy about Walter, if I ever did.

Big Roy drove the car up into the yard. “It’s getting bad around here,” he said. “Somebody tried to steal the Chrysler. Came in the yard with a tow truck when I wasn’t home, told the neighbors that I asked them to do it. It was lucky that my partner, Wickliffe, was home from work and run them off with his pistol.”

“Wickliffe is what? Eighty years old?”

“You’re as young as your gun,” Big Roy said.

“Only in Eloe,” I said.

It felt strange coming home with no bags to bring in. My arms felt useless as they swung by my side.

“Hungry?” Big Roy asked.

“Starving.”

He opened the side door and I stepped into the living room. Everything was laid out the same way—sectional situated so that every seat provided a view of the television. The recliner was new, but it was placed where the old one had been. Above the couch was a large piece of art that Olive prized, showing a serene woman wearing an African head scarf, reading a book. Olive bought it at the swap meet and paid extra for the gilded frame. The room was so clean that a faint lemony smell rose up from the vacuum tracks in the carpet.

“Who fixed up the house?” I said.

“Your mama’s church ladies. When they heard you were coming home, they came over here like a cooking-cleaning army.”

I nodded. “Any one church lady in particular?”

“No,” Big Roy said. “It’s too soon for all of that. Come in. Go on in the bathroom and wash up.”

While I was lathering my hands in the sink, I thought of Walter washing his hands in his obsessive way. I wondered if he had a new cell partner by now. I gave Walter everything I owned—clothes, hairbrush, my few books, and my radio. I even left my deodorant. What he could use he would keep, and what he could trade or sell would be swapped or sold.

The hot water felt good, and I left my hands under the faucet until I couldn’t stand the heat.

“On your bed are some essentials. Tomorrow you can go to Walmart and get whatever else you need.”

“Thanks, Daddy.”

That word, Daddy. I never used it with Walter even though I think he would have liked it. He even said it himself a couple of times, “Listen to me. I’m your daddy.” But never did I let the word escape my lips.

Once I was washed up, Big Roy and I heaped our plates. It was the same fare they brought out when somebody died—baked chicken, string beans boiled slow with ham, clover rolls, macaroni and cheese. Big Roy placed his dinner in the microwave, pushed a few buttons, and the plate revolved under the light. Sparks flew as the metal rim popped like a cap gun. Using oven mitts, he removed his food, covered it with a paper towel, and held his hand out for mine.

We sat together in the living room with our plates resting on our laps.

“You want to say the blessing?” Big Roy asked me.

“Heavenly,” I began, choking again on the word father. “Thank you for this food that will nourish our bodies.” I tried to find other things to say, but all I could think about was how my mother was gone forever and my wife wasn’t here either. “Thank you for my father. Thank you for this homecoming.” Then I added, “Amen.” I kept my head down waiting for Big Roy to echo. When he didn’t, I looked up to find him rocking slightly with his hand over his mouth.

“All Olive wanted was to see this day. That was all she ever asked for and she’s not here to experience it. You’re home and we’re sitting here eating other women’s food. I know the Lord has a plan, but this isn’t right.”

I should have gone over to him, but what did I know about comforting a grown man? Olive would have sat beside him, pulled his face into her chest and shushed him in a woman’s way. Even though I was hungry, I didn’t pick up my fork until he was able to pick up his. By then, the magic of the microwave had worn off, leaving the food tough and dry.

Big Roy stood up. “You tired, son? I would like to go to bed early. Start fresh in the morning.”

It was only seven o’clock, but in winter the days are short, if not warm. I went to my room and dressed in the pajamas Big Roy or maybe the church ladies set out for me.

Five years was a long time in real-life time. In inside life, it wasn’t forever. It was a stretch of time with an end you could see. I wonder what I would have done differently if I had known that five years was all I was looking at. It was hard being behind bars when I turned thirty-five, but would it have been so hard if somebody told me that the next year I would be a free man? Time can’t always be measured with a watch or a calendar or even grains of sand.

“Celestial.” I did this every night, chanting her name like a plea, even after her letter written on paper the color of the palms of my useless hands. Even when I did the things that it embarrasses me to recollect, I was always thinking of her, wondering what I would tell her about what I had done, what was given me, what was stolen, who I touched. Sometimes I thought she would understand. Or even if she didn’t, she would come to empathize. She would know that I thought that I was gone away forever.

Celestial was a tricky woman to figure out; she almost didn’t marry me, although I never doubted her love. For one thing, I made a couple of procedural errors with my proposal, but more than that, I don’t think she planned on getting married at all. She kept this display she called a “vision board,” basically a corkboard where she tacked up words like prosperity, creativity, passion! There were also magazine pictures that showed what she wanted out of life. Her dream was for her artworks to be part of the Smithsonian, but there was also a cottage on Amelia Island and an image of the earth as seen from the moon. No wedding dress or engagement ring factored into this little collage. It didn’t bother me, but it bothered me.

It’s not that I was planning a wedding like a twelve-year-old girl, nor was I some clown fantasizing about fathering ten sons, handing out cigars every eighteen months. But I pictured myself with two kids, Trey and then a girl. Spontaneity and playing it by ear is fine for those who can afford it, but a boy from Eloe had to have a strategy. This was something that Celestial and I had in common; neither of us believed in letting chips fall where they may.

About a year ago, in the throes of hopelessness, I destroyed every letter she ever sent me, except for her carefully composed Dear John. And yes, Walter warned me against wadding all that scented paper into a ball and plunking it into the metal commode. Why I chose to save the one letter that hurt me most, I don’t know. But now, on my first night of breathing unfettered air, here I was about to read it again.

If I could have stopped myself, I would have. Unfolding the page carefully so that it wouldn’t give way at the softened creases, I ran my fingers under the words, feeling for the hope I sometimes found sheltered there.

Ours was a love story, the kind that’s not supposed to happen to black girls anymore. This was vintage romance made scarce after Dr. King, along with Negro-owned dress shops, drugstores, and cafeterias. By the time I was born, Sweet Auburn, once the richest Negro street in the world, was split in two by the freeway and left to die. Stubborn Ebenezer was still standing, a proud reminder of her famous son, whose marble tomb and eternity flame kept watch next door. When I was twenty-four, living in New York City, I thought that maybe black love went that way, too, integrated into near extinction.

Nikki Giovanni said, “Black love is Black wealth.” On a drunk night in the West Village, my roommate Imani tattooed this on her right hip, hoping for the best. She and I were both HBCU alums, so grad school was culture shock and dystopia at the same time. In art school there were only two of us who were black, and the other one, a guy, seemed to be mad at me every day for spoiling his uniqueness. Imani was in the same boat, getting her poetry degree, so we took jobs waiting tables at Maroons, a restaurant in Manhattan that specialized in black comfort food from all over the globe: jerk chicken, jollof rice, collard greens, and corn bread. Our boyfriends were our supervisors, smoldering men with colonial accents. Too old, too broke, and too handsome, they were as faithless as the weather, but like Imani said, “Black and alive is always a good start.”

Back then, I was trying to fit into the New York artsy scene. I was always on a diet, and I tried to stop saying “y’all” and “ma’am.” For the most part, I was successful, unless I was drinking. After three gin fizzes, all that Southwest Atlanta came pouring out like I never had an elocution lesson. Roy, back then, lived in Atlanta metro but only barely, renting an apartment so far out that he could hardly catch the R&B station on the radio. He worked a cubicle job that compensated him fairly well for agreeing to integrate their workplace. He didn’t like or dislike it; for him, a job was a means to an end. The travel part of it he did enjoy, since before signing on he hadn’t ventured west of Dallas or north of Baltimore.

Of course, I wasn’t aware of any of this when Imani seated his party at a big round table in my section. All I knew was that table 6 was a party of eight, seven of whom were white. Expecting him to be that kind of brother, I was all business. As I recited the specials, I could feel the black guy staring at me, even though the redhead to his left appeared to be his girlfriend, leaning toward him as she read the menu. Finally, she ordered a sorrel caipirinha. “And what will you have, sir?” I asked him, chilly as a tax auditor.

“I’ll have a Jack and coke,” he said. “Georgia girl.”

I flinched like someone slipped an ice cube down the back of my shirt. “My accent?”

All the people at his table grinned, especially the redhead. “You don’t have a southern accent,” she declared. “All of us are from Georgia. You’re all Yankee.”

Yankee was a white word, the verbal equivalent of the rebel flag, leftover anger about the civil war. I turned back to the black guy—we were a team now—and gave the tiniest of eye rolls. In response, he gave an almost imperceptible shoulder shrug that said, White folk gonna white folk. Then he leaned slightly away from the redhead, this time communicating, This is a work dinner. She isn’t my date.

Then, in words, he said, “I think I know you. Your hair is different, but didn’t you go to Spelman? I’m Roy Hamilton, your Morehouse brother.”

I never really bought into the SpelHouse mentality about us being brothers and sisters, maybe because I had been a transfer student, missing out on the Freshman Week rituals and ceremonies. But at that twinkle, it was as though we discovered that we were long-lost play cousins.

“Roy Hamilton.” I said the name slowly, trying to jog some sort of memory, but he looked too much like a standard-issue Morehouse man, the type who declared his business major in kindergarten.

“What was your name again?” He asked, squinting at my name tag, which read imani. The real Imani was across the room wearing a celestial tag.

“Imani,” the redhead said, clearly annoyed. “Can’t you read?”

Roy pretended like he didn’t hear her. “No,” he said. “That’s not it. Your name was something old timey, like Ruthie Mae.”

“Celestial,” I said. “I’m named for my mother.”

“I’m surprised you don’t go by Celeste now that you’re up here in New York City. I’m Roy, Roy Othaniel Hamilton, to be exact.”

At the sound of that middle name—talk about old timey—I did remember him. He had been a playboy, a mack, a hustler. All those things. My manager, who only yesterday insisted that he was not my man, cleared his throat. Game recognize game and all of that.

Is this nostalgia? Is this how it really happened? I wish we had taken a photo so I could remember how we looked later that evening standing outside the restaurant. Winter arrived early that year. Roy wore a lightweight wool coat, with a puny little scarf that probably came with it. I was bundled against the elements in a down coat Gloria sent me, so convinced was she that I would die of hypothermia before I finished my “artist phase” and came back home to get a master’s in education. Snow fell in wet clumps, but I didn’t tie my hood, wanting Roy to see my face.

Much of life is timing and circumstance, I see that now. Roy came into my life at the time when I needed a man like him. Would I have galloped into this love affair if I had never left Atlanta? I don’t know. But how you feel love and understand love are two different things. Now, so many years down the road, I recognize that I was alone and adrift and that he was lonely in the way that only a ladies man can be. He reminded me of Atlanta, and I reminded him of the same. All these were reasons why we were drawn to each other, but standing with him outside of Maroons, we were past reason. Human emotion is beyond comprehension, smooth and uninterrupted, like an orb made of blown glass.

Standing on the sidewalk outside the restaurant, I memorized her—the shape of her lips and the purple tint of her lipstick, which matched the streaks in her hair. I knew her accent, southern but not too much, and I knew her shape, thick through the hips but slim on top. I had said her name was “something old timey,” but I should have said “something classic.” I could remember the feel of her name in my mouth, like the details of a dream.

“Want to see Brooklyn?” she asked. “My other roommate works at Two Steps Down. If we go there, we can drink for free.”

My first mind was to tell her that we didn’t need free cocktails, but I had a feeling she would be more annoyed than impressed, so I said, “Let’s get a taxi.”

“You won’t get a taxi tonight.”

“How come?” By way of question, I tapped the brown skin peeking out between my camel-hair coat and my soft leather gloves.

“That,” she said, “and it’s snowing. Meter’s double. We better take the subway.” She pointed at a green orb, and we descended a staircase into a world that reminded me of that dark scene in The Wiz.

“After you,” she said, depositing a token at the turnstile, nudging me through.

I felt like a blind man who left his cane at home. “You know,” I said. “I’m here on business. Sales meeting in the morning.”

She smiled in a polite way. “That’s nice,” she said, but she didn’t care at all about my professional standing. Hell, I didn’t even care about it all that much, but the point was to remind her that I had something going on in my life.

I’m not a fan of public transportation. In Atlanta, there was the bus or the MARTA train, and you only took those if you couldn’t afford a car. When I first got to Morehouse, I had no choice, but as soon as I gathered four nickels at the same time, I bought myself the last remaining Ford Pinto. Andre called it the “Auto Bomb” on account of the safety issue, but it never stopped him or anybody else from bumming a ride.

The A train was nothing like you would think from the song. The New York subway was packed with people, and you could smell whatever stuffed their damp sleeping bag coats. The floor was covered with the kind of linoleum that you only find in the projects, and the seats were a fixed-income shade of orange. And do not get me started on the able-bodied men sprawled out, taking up two seats sometimes while ladies were left standing.

For the jerky ride, we stood in front of a black lady who clinched a large shopping bag to her chest and slept like she was at home in the bed. Beside her was a light-skinned dude, the type we used to call “DeBarge.” He had a portrait gallery inked all over his head. Over his cheekbone was a woman’s face, and she appeared to be weeping.

“Georgia,” I said into her hair. “How can you live up here?”

She turned around to answer me, and our faces were so close that she leaned back to keep from kissing me. “I’m not really living here, living here. I’m in grad school, paying dues.”

“So you’re pretending to be a waitress?”

She adjusted her grip on the strap and lifted her foot to show me a black shoe with a thick rubber sole. “Somebody needs to tell my feet I’m pretending, because they are killing me like I’m really working.”

I chuckled with her, but I felt sorry, thinking about my mama back in Louisiana who was always complaining about her arches. She claimed it was because of the high heels she wore on Sundays, but it was really from being on her feet all day, fixing trays at the meat-and-three.

“What are you in school for?” I hoped that she wasn’t getting a PhD, an MBA, or a law degree. It’s not like I had anything against women getting ahead in the world, but I didn’t want to have to explain why it was that I decided to cool my heels with just my BA.

“Fine arts,” she said, “concentrating on textiles and folk art.” I could see from the little turn-up at the corner of her eyes that she was so proud that she could have been her own mother, but I had no idea what she was talking about.

“Is that right?” I said.

“I’m an artisan,” she said, not like she was explaining but like she was sharing the good news. “I’m a doll maker.”

“That’s what you’re going to do for a living?”

“Haven’t you ever heard of Faith Ringgold?” I hadn’t, but she kept on. “I want to be like her. With dolls instead of quilts. I want to get a tax ID and go into business.”

“What’s the name of the corporation?”

“Babydolls,” she said.

“Sounds like a strip club.”

“No, it doesn’t,” she said, loud enough that it woke up the lady dozing on the seat in front of us. The guy with the face tattoos twitched a little bit.

“It’s just that my degree is in marketing,” I said. “It’s my job to think about things like that.”

She kept looking like she was offended in a pretty meaningful way.

“Maybe another name might be more effective.” Since it seemed like I was moving in the right direction, I kept going. “You could call it Poupées. That’s French for dolls.”

“French?” she asked, eyeing me. “You’re Haitian?”

“Me?” I shook my head. “I’m a standard-issue American Negro.”

“But you speak French?” She sounded hopeful, like she had a translation job that needed doing. For a second, I considered throwing down my Louisiana credentials, because women dig it when you claim to be Creole, but I didn’t feel like lying to her. “I studied French in high school and took a few hours toward a minor at Morehouse.”

“My supervisor, Didier,” she said. “He’s Haitian. Kind of Haitian. He was born in Brooklyn but still Haitian. You know how it is up here. He speaks French.”

I may seem like I fell off a turnip truck, but I knew enough to know that it’s never a good sign when a woman brings up another brother out of the blue like that.

After we changed trains, she finally said, “This is our stop,” and led me up a filthy little staircase tiled like a public restroom. As we emerged into the Brooklyn night, I was surprised to see trees up and down the sides of the road. As I looked up at their stripped branches, chubby snowflakes floated down. I’m a southern boy by birth and constitution, so a real snowfall was something to see. It was all I could do not to stick my tongue out to taste one. “It’s like TV,” I said.

“Tomorrow it will be all filthy and stacked up on the side of the road. But it’s nice when it’s fresh like this.”

We turned down the next street and I wanted to take her hand. The buildings on each side of the road were light brown, like pencil shavings, and the walls of one touched the other so that the road appeared to be flanked by castles. She explained that each of the brownstones was built to be houses for one family, all four stories, but now they were cut up into apartments.

“I live right there,” she said, pointing across the street and down. “Garden level. See?”

I followed her arm with my eyes.

“Oh, hell no,” she said. “Not again.”

I was squinting in the light, trying to peek between the snowflakes to see what she was worried about. Before I could figure out what from what, she hollered, “Hey,” and took off like she had been snapped from a slingshot. She got four or five seconds on me, just from the surprise factor. When I took off after her, I still wasn’t 100 percent sure what was going on. I gave it all I had, but I was still pulling up the rear. Like Spike Lee said that time: It’s the shoes. What I wore on my feet were for styling, not striding—oxblood Florsheims that would make a preacher covetous. Leather upper and sole. Celestial had on glorified nurse’s shoes, ugly as newborn puppies, but a plus in a street race.

When I spotted the dude running, I assessed the situation. In between her calling him all kinds of motherfuckers, she ordered him, “Put my shit down!” Apparently, we were chasing a burglar, one who could really move. She was going pretty good, but this dude was booking. He had on a pair of Jordans he probably stole from somebody, and like I said, it’s the shoes.

Carlton Avenue is a long street. Brownstones on each side, all the way, and trees with roots that buckled the sidewalk, turning the chase into an obstacle course. Apparently, I was the only one without prior experience. Celestial was hopping over the exposed roots without missing a beat. The burglar was even better, graceful even. You could tell this wasn’t his first rodeo.

He knew she wasn’t going to catch him. I knew she wasn’t going to catch him. As a sensible man, I’m not one to chase wild geese, but I had to keep running as long as she did. How would it look if I hung back while my date chased a criminal? So I kept pushing, even though I was struggling to breathe. A man does what he has to do.

How long did this chase go on? Forever. Between the cold air icing up my lungs and shoes pinching my feet, it occurred to me that I might be killing myself. Ahead, Celestial focused on the kid, and cussing like a longshoreman. I caught a charley horse, only it was in my heart. Even though all the profanity slowed her down a hair, it wasn’t looking good for me. I was bigger, late to start, and to cap it off, I was dressed like Louis Farrakhan. I’m no follower of the Nation, but the thought of Farrakhan gave me a little boost. He may be outrageous on some matters, but he has a grip on some basic things. No matter what Minister Farrakhan happened to be wearing, there was no way he would let a sister apprehend a burglar while he sat back and watched.

I swear, just then, the gods smiled on me. As I dug down in my inner reserve for strength and endurance, Celestial’s foot snagged on a chunk of jagged sidewalk and she went sprawling. In three strides, I caught up and jumped over her like Carl Lewis. For me, the race was over right then, before my dress shoes hit the ground. They could have played the theme music and rolled the credits with me in midair.

Too bad this wasn’t a movie. I landed, slid a few inches in the wrong direction, got my bearings back and kept moving. The kid was only a couple of sidewalk squares ahead, looking back. Now I went for the grand prize. I pumped my arms and legs harder, trying to recall anything I learned from high school track. Then he stumbled, costing him some ground. He was close enough now that I could read the label on the back of his shirt: Kani. My fingers closed around his skinny ankle as I hit the asphalt with my right knee taking the lead. He gave his leg a couple of vigorous shakes, but I was holding on for dear life.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” he marveled. “What if I had a gun?”

I honestly stopped a second to think about it, and in that second, he jerked his foot free and kicked me in the face. To his credit, I will say that he didn’t kick me as harshly as he could have. He didn’t stomp my head into the sidewalk. As kicks go, it was more like a love tap, delivered straight to my mouth, knocking loose one of my bottom teeth.

Behind me, I could hear Celestial’s rubber-soled footfalls. I was scared that she was going to play me like a hurdle and continue this crazy chase, but she stopped and knelt beside me.

“I didn’t get your stuff back,” I said, gasping for breath.

“I don’t care. You’re my hero,” she said. I thought she was being funny, but her hands on the side of my face said that she wasn’t.

The dentist who fitted me for a bridge told me that he could have saved my tooth if I had gone to the hospital. Celestial even suggested it at the time, but I waved it away as we headed back to her small apartment that she shared with three people and a dozen baby dolls. She gave me a cold compress and called the police. The officer didn’t arrive for another two hours, and by then my nose was wide open. I was giddy like the Jackson 5. Do re mi. ABC. On the police report, she signed her full name and I would have tattooed it on my forehead: Celestial Gloriana Davenport.

The whole truth wasn’t anybody’s business but mine and Celestial’s.

On the Sunday before we laid Olive to rest, I visited the prison while Celestial stayed with Roy’s father. I say visit for lack of a better term. Maybe it’s best to say that I went to see him. As we shared three bags of chips from the vending machine, Roy asked me to take his place on Monday morning and carry his mother’s casket from the hearse to the altar. I agreed but not gladly; this wasn’t a task you take on with pleasure. Big Roy had drafted an extra deacon to carry the right-hand corner load, but I was to explain to him that Roy sent me and the deacon would step aside. We shook on it, like we were finishing a business deal. When we let go, I stood up to leave, but Roy didn’t move.

“I got to stay here until visiting hours are over.”

“You’ll just sit?”

He curled up one side of his mouth. “It’s better than going back in there. I don’t mind it.”

“I can wait another minute,” I said, returning to the plastic chair.

“You see that dude?” He pointed to a skinny man with a flat-top fade and Malcolm X glasses. “That’s my father. My Biological. I met him in here.”

I stole a glance at the older man who was speaking to a chubby brunette wearing a flowered dress.

“He met her from the classifieds,” Roy explained.

“I wasn’t looking at his lady,” I said. “I’m tripping. Your actual father?”

“Apparently so.” He went over my face, slowly, like he was searching a grid. “You didn’t know,” he said. “You didn’t know.”

“How would I know?”

“Celestial didn’t tell you. If she didn’t tell you, she didn’t tell anybody.” As he was pleased, I felt a little sting somewhere between a mosquito and a yellow jacket.

“You look like your pops,” I said, pointing with my chin.

“Big Roy is my pops. Him over there, we’re cool now, but back in the day, nigger went for a pack of cigarettes and never came back. Now I see him every day.” He shook his head. “I feel like it’s supposed to mean something—like in the whole scheme of things—but I don’t know what.”

I sat there silent, uncomfortable in the gray suit I would wear to the wake later in the day. I had no idea what it could mean. Fathers were complicated beings. I was seven when my father met a woman at a trade show and defected, creating a new family. My dad had pulled this sort of trick before, falling stupid in love with a stranger and threatening to set up house with her. His business—running an icehouse—required that he travel to conventions, where he got caught up in the excitement. He was a passionate man, clearly. When I was three, he fell for a woman who hailed from the world of dry ice and shipping, but she decided not to leave her husband, and he returned to Evie and me. After that, there were other zealous flirtations, but nothing stuck. He met the Ice Sculptress at an overnight trade show in Denver. After just under thirty-six hours in her marvelous company, he came home, packed up all his shit and was gone for good. For whatever it’s worth, they have a son and a daughter together and he hung tight and watched them grow up.

I spread my hands. “The Lord works in mysterious ways?”

“Something like that,” he said. “My mama is gone.”

“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

He shook his head, and contemplated his palms. “I appreciate you,” he said. “Carrying her for me.”

“You know I got you,” I said.

“Tell Celestial I miss her. Tell her I said thank you for singing.”

“No problem,” I said again, pushing up from my chair.

“Dre,” he said. “Don’t take this the wrong way. But she’s my wife. Remember that.” Then he smiled, big and broad, revealing a dark gap. “I’m just kidding, man. Tell her I asked after her.”

Celestial isn’t the kind of singer you would want at your wedding. While her mother is a gravity-defying soprano, she is a scotch-and-Marlboros alto. Even when she was a little girl, her voice was like the middle of the night. When she gives a song, it isn’t entertaining; rather, it sounds like she is telling secrets that are not hers to reveal.

Just as Roy asked me to be a pallbearer, he asked Celestial to offer up a hymn. She walked to the front of the congregation not looking at all like herself. With her hair ironed straight and a navy-blue dress borrowed from Gloria, she seemed humbled. Not brought low, but there was respect in her decision not to be gorgeous.

“Miss Olive loved two things.” The microphone gave her words a ghost echo. “She loved the Lord and she loved her family, especially her son. Most of you know why Roy is not here. But he’s not absent.” As Celestial stepped back a few paces, the nurse ushers communicated with hand signals, ready to swoop in, in case she was about to break down, but she was stepping back only because her voice was too big for her to stand so close to the sound system.

She sang “Jesus Promised Me a Home” without the benefit of a piano accompaniment, looking past the casket of dark wood. Staring right at Roy Senior, she gave it all she had until women stood up and raised their fans, and a gentleman in the front room repeated, “Thank you, Jesus.” Singing, she wounded and healed both. “If He said it, I know it’s true.” She wasn’t grandstanding or trying to break him down, but she hollered out that melody, delivering both the Holy Spirit and earthly emotion until Big Roy’s shoulders bucked and the cooling waters came down. I’m no theologian, but there was Love in that room. She said that Roy was not absent, and when she finished, not one soul doubted this.

Celestial returned to the pew beside me, exhausted, and I took her hand. With her head on my shoulder she said, “I want to go home.”

After the eulogy, which was standard fare about wives and mothers, with talk of the book of Ruth, it was time for the pallbearers to take our places. Roy Senior insisted that we bear her weight in the formal way, balanced on our shoulders without the benefit of hands. The mortician directed us like he was conducting an orchestra, and at his command the six of us settled Miss Olive upon our shoulders and inched our way out of the sanctuary. There is no weight like the burden of a body. The load was shared by six, but I felt alone in my labors. With every step, the casket bumped my ear, and for a superstitious second, I thought I was maybe receiving a dispatch from the other side.

The three of us—Roy Senior, Celestial, and me—rode in a limousine driven by the undertaker’s son, who asked if we wanted air-conditioning. “No, Reggie,” Roy Senior said. “I prefer fresh air.” And he lowered the window, letting in a humid breeze, as thick as blood. I sat still, concentrating on breathing. Celestial was wearing a perfume that smelled like romance. Roy Senior sucked on peppermint, strong and sweet. On my left side, Celestial took my hand, and I enjoyed the cool feel of it.

“I would appreciate it if you wouldn’t do that,” Roy Senior said. She pulled her fingers away, leaving me with a vacant palm.

After a few miles, the hearse led the small processional down a bumpy, unpaved road. The jostling unlocked something in Roy Senior, who said, “I love Olive in ways you young people can’t even picture. I was the best husband I knew how to be and the best father I could manage. She showed me how to join with a woman. She taught me to take care of a little boy.”

I flexed my hand. “Yes, sir,” I said, and Celestial hummed a tune I recognized but didn’t know the title of. She was like a different person, deeper and broader, like she perceived something about life and death and love that I had the luxury of not knowing yet.

At the cemetery, we hefted the coffin again. As we made our way to the grave, I marveled at how a town so small had accumulated so many dead. Near the front were the modern headstones, polished granite, but in the distance stood timeworn markers, limestone probably. For this leg of Olive’s journey, we were allowed to use our hands to steady her, and then we set her down on the straps stretched across the gaping hole in the earth.

The minister was behind us, chanting as he took his place. He spoke about the corruptible body that worms would destroy and the immaculate, untouchable spirit. We all said dust to dust. The small crowd of mourners pulled apart the floral arrangements, tossing the bright flowers into the hole as workers loosened the straps and lowered Olive into the ground.

Under the green tent, Celestial sat next to Roy Senior, soothing him as the top of the cement vault was thumped into place. She dabbed at her eyes with wadded tissue while the workers unrolled the AstroTurf from the pile. They hung back, not wanting to start up the earth-mover tractor while the family was still there. It troubled me a little to think that Celestial, Roy Senior, and I constituted “the family,” but there we were.

I stood up. “I think it’s time for us to go, sir. People will be waiting for us at the church.”

Celestial stood, too. “Everyone will be there.”

“Who is everybody? Ain’t no everybody without my wife.”

Behind us, the grave diggers were antsy and ready to do what they had been hired to do. I could smell the grave, fertile and musty, like fishing bait. Finally Roy Senior stood and went over like he was going to grab a handful of soil and toss it over the coffin, already settled six feet down. Celestial and I walked close behind and were surprised when he sat down on the mound in a deliberate way, almost like a protest.

Celestial said, “Sir?”

And Roy Senior didn’t say anything. Celestial followed him and sat, too. I swiveled my head looking for someone to help us out here, but the few mourners had gone, likely heading back for the repast supper. Taking her lead, I joined them. The dirt was wet and the moisture seeped in through the seat of my trousers as the grave diggers spoke to each other in hushed Spanish.

Although I was close on his right flank, Roy Senior spoke only to Celestial, explaining to her that she was the one responsible now. “Olive went to see Little Roy every week right up until she was too sick to make the journey. She stays on top of Mr. Banks. She calls him every Wednesday around lunchtime. I can’t say what he has done so far, but she kept on him. She’s gone now, so it’s up to you, Celestial. I’ll do what I can,” he explained, “but a man needs a woman to care after him.”

Celestial nodded with wet eyes. “Yes, sir,” she said. “I understand.”

“Do you?” he said, regarding her with wary eyes. “You think you know everything, but you’re too young, girl.”

I stood up and brushed the back of my clothes. I held out a hand to Celestial and she pulled herself up. Then I extended my hand to Big Roy. “Sir, let’s go and let these men do their work.”

Roy Senior got up, but he didn’t use my arm for support. He is a big man, and beside him I felt narrow as a switch.

“It ain’t their work,” he said. “It’s mine.” Then he strode over to a tree and picked up the shovel resting against the bark. Though not a young man, Roy Senior moved the earth in heaping shovelfuls and heaved it onto Olive’s vault. I’ll never forget the sound of the landing dirt.

I picked up the other shovel, thinking of Roy and that I should be his understudy here. Roy Senior barked that I should put the shovel down, but then, kinder, he said, “This isn’t your job. I know you call yourself stepping in for Little Roy, but even if he was here, this wouldn’t be none of his work either. This is personal. Just me and my wife. I need to cover her with my own hands. You and Celestial take the Cadillac; I’ll meet you when I’m done with what I need to do.”

We obeyed him like he was our own father. We walked away, weaving through the headstones until we reached the sedan idling on the path. When we opened the door, we surprised the driver, who hastily shut off the dance music bumping through the speakers. As we pulled away, like children, we twisted to look through the back windshield, watching Roy Senior John Henry his wife’s grave.

Celestial sighed. “You’ll never see anything like that again, no matter how long you live.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Roy has been away so long,” she whispered. “I’ve done everything I’m supposed to do. I haven’t thought about any other man, let alone touched one. But when I look at Mr. Roy out there, at his wife’s grave, I feel like I’ve been playing at marriage. That I don’t know what it is to be committed.” And then she sobbed a wet spot onto my dirty white shirt. “I don’t want to go to the church. I just want to go home.”

In Eloe, if you want to know who you’re supposed to be, you don’t have to go further than the family Bible. Right there, on a blank page, before “In the beginning …” is all you need to know. There were other truths in the world, but they weren’t often written down. These unofficial records of kin were passed from lips to ear. Much was made of white relatives, whispered about sometimes in shame, sometimes in satisfaction, depending on the details. Then there was other family on the right side of the color line, but the wrong side of the property line. I was the rare soul in Eloe with no family ties outside of my parents. Olive was born in Oklahoma City and there was family there, but I never met them. Big Roy was from Howland, Texas, and wandered to Eloe on his way to Jackson. Our family Bible they received as a wedding gift from Big Roy’s landlady. When you lift the leather cover, there are only our three names spelled out in Olive’s careful cursive.

Roy McHenry Hamilton + Olive Ann Ingelman

Roy Othaniel Hamilton Jr.

Olive never wrote Celestial’s name beside mine, but there was a lot of room on the page, space to list all the Hamiltons of the future, connected with diagonal lines and dashes.

Davina Hardrick was different. At least a dozen black Hardricks lived in town, even a few Hardriks, without the c, who changed their names when the family split like a feuding congregation. I envied her these robust roots, thick enough to buckle the sidewalk. She said she was living in Miss Annie Mae’s house, and I tried to remember who Miss Annie Mae was to her, what Bible lines connected them. I remembered Davina’s grandfather, Mr. Picard, or maybe he was her uncle? There had been something extended about her family, that much I did remember. Once I had known who all was kin to anybody else.

I had run into Davina at Walmart when I had gone to buy flowers for Olive. Davina, dressed in a blue uniform, unlocked the floral refrigerator and helped me select a bouquet that I couldn’t bring myself to deliver. Wrapping my purchase in clean white paper, she asked me if I remembered her from high school, even though she was a couple of years ahead of me. I told her that I did. She asked me if I would like to have a home-cooked meal. I told her I would. A few hours later I stood in front of the clapboard house outfitted for Christmas with multicolored lights and metallic ribbon.

I climbed up the three concrete steps and stood on the sloping porch. The little house must have been seventy, maybe eighty years old, built probably by Miss Annie Mae’s husband. This neighborhood was known as the Hardwood, where the colored mill workers lived, back when there was a mill, back when colored was a word of respect. I rapped on the silver-wreathed door, almost wishing I wore a hat so I could take it off and hold it in my hands.

“Hey,” she said through the screen door, looking inviting in a holiday apron that set off her skin tone, a lush brown with red underneath like a nice pair of loafers. She tilted her head to the side. “You look nice.”

“You, too.” Kitchen aromas spiced the air all the way out here, and I wanted more than anything in this world to cross her threshold.

“You’re early,” she said with a little smile, not like she was annoyed, but letting me know. “Give me a minute to fix my hair.” Then she shut the door. I sat down on the front stairs and waited. Five years away and you get good at that sort of thing. I sat there, but I didn’t turn my face on the diagonal to the orange-brick funeral home where they had taken care of my mother. Instead, I sat with my eyes on my own fingers, so much like Walter’s, knotty with yellowish calluses. I went in with bankers’ hands and came out looking like a mill worker. But at least I was out. Something you learn in there: keep your mind on what’s important.

Edwards Street was mostly quiet. A cluster of little boys used bacon and string to catch crawfish in the ditch that ran along the sides of the road. In the distance, I could see the reflection of the neon lights in the liquor store window and feel the faint vibration of the subwoofers that shook the air. This was my hometown. I skinned my knees on these streets; I learned to be a man on these same corners, but I didn’t feel like I was home.

When Davina came to the door the second time, she wasn’t wearing the apron, and I missed it, though the burgundy dress she changed into highlighted everything captivating about a woman’s body. In high school, she had a perfect figure—small and thick at the same time, what we used to call a “brick house.” Big Roy warned me those girls that are fine at fifteen get fat by thirty, so you shouldn’t marry them. Thinking of Davina, that advice seemed childish and cruel. Yes, she had a lot going on in the bust and the hip, but she looked delicious.

“You still married?” she asked through the screen door.

“I don’t know,” I said.

She smiled, cocking her head, showing a tuft of tinsel tucked behind her ear like a gardenia. “Come on in,” she said. “Dinner will be ready in a minute. You want something to drink?”

“What you think?” I watched her splendid curves as she walked the few steps to the kitchen.

The old me, and I don’t mean the me before I went to prison, I mean the old me from way before I starting going out with Celestial, the me I was in my early twenties and running through women like water—that me would have known what to say. Back then, I knew how to focus. Keep my mind on my money and my money on my mind. I used to say that to myself under my breath, no matter what it was that I was zooming in on. One thing at a time. That’s how you win. But here I was, in front of one woman, one fine woman, and I was sitting here thinking about a wife I hadn’t talked to in two years.

I’m not saying that I was anybody’s angel during my marriage. As they say, mistakes were made and feelings were bruised, like that one time when Celestial happened upon a receipt for two pieces of lingerie, not just for the one I gave her for her birthday. She wasn’t livid, but it was going that way. I said to her, “Celestial, I don’t love anybody but you.” It didn’t necessarily explain the little piece of paper in her hand, but it was God’s truth, and I suspect that she understood that.

Sitting in Davina’s living room drinking up her liquor, I held Celestial’s face in my mind, her scent in my nose, her song in my ear. Even still, I looked at Davina and my mouth went wet. “When did Miss Annie Mae pass?” I asked her. “She was a nice lady. I remember when she sold sour pickles for a dime. When we were little. You remember that?”

“She’s been gone four years now. I was surprised that she left everything to me, but we were always close, and her son lives in Houston now. His name was Wofford. Remember him?”

I did remember him as the local boy made good who came to speak to us when we were in high school, telling us to not to drop out, get anybody pregnant, or smoke crack. “Yeah, I recall.”

Davina smirked. “With Miss Annie Mae gone, I don’t expect we will ever see him again in this town.” She shook her head. “My daddy was the same way. Halfway to Dallas before I even turned five years old.”

I said, “You don’t know for sure why he went.”

She smiled again, a real smile like she appreciated me trying to look on the bright side. “All I know is that he’s gone. Same trifling story everybody tells.”

“Don’t call him trifling,” I said. “Men have reasons.”

She shushed me. “You didn’t come here to talk about my daddy, did you?” And there was a question in her question. Women have that way of asking you more than what they want to know.

“Food smells good,” I said, trying to lighten the mood. “Louisiana women. I swear y’all come out of the womb gripping a skillet.”

I hoped that I would get to the table and see a bowl of crowder peas, pulled from the vines that grew along the fence that separated Davina’s property from the neighbors’. When I was coming up, Mr. Fontenot, the language teacher, had lived there. I ended up enrolled in French class by accident, the only black kid in the room. Me and Mr. Fontenot were close, both being onlies.

He told me about the French Club, how they met after school and practiced the language in preparation for a ten-day trip to Paris. I asked Mr. Fontenot if there were black people in Paris, and he said, “Both local and imported.” He gave me a novel by James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain, that had nothing to do with France, but he assured me that the author was there as we spoke. I turned the book over and studied the sad but intelligent face. James Baldwin was plenty black. “Learn the language,” Mr. Fontenot said, “and I will help sponsor your journey.” But three things happened: I would have been the only black kid going on the trip and nobody thought much of that idea. “Something goes wrong over there and it will be your word against theirs,” Big Roy said. Another thing was the money. Seven hundred fifty dollars would have been my share even with Mr. Fontenot sponsoring me. That’s why no black kids were going. And the last thing was Mr. Fontenot himself.

When he hipped me to Go Tell It on the Mountain, he didn’t say one word about Jimmy being a homosexual. “Jimmy” is how Mr. Fontenot always talked about him, like they went way back. According to Mr. Fontenot, Jimmy started saving his papers for posterity when he was only eleven years old because he knew he was going to be important and that he was going to need “documentation of his trajectory.” He had then given me a little black notebook. “You should keep a journal for future generations,” he said. “When you get out of this town, people are going to want to know how you did it.” It was this journal that ended all my plans, more than the money. Big Roy didn’t like the look of the little book and neither did my mother. Eloe is a small town, claustrophobic and mean sometimes. Didn’t take more than a couple of phone calls for my parents to find out that Mr. Fontenot was “funny like that,” and there was no way they were sending me to Paris under his sponsorship.

“What happened to Mr. Fontenot?”

“He passed away in the early nineties,” Davina said.

“From what?”

“You know what I’m talking about,” she said. “Come on, you need to eat.”

I got up and headed to the oval-shaped table, like the one I grew up eating on. Six people could fit easy. I pulled back the chair and was about to sit down when she asked me if I would like to wash my hands. Shamefaced, I asked her where the bathroom was. Lathering up with soap that smelled like girls, I felt a little prickle of anger along the underside of my jaw, but I splashed water on my chin until it settled. Tilting my head under the faucet, I filled my mouth with the soft water and swallowed it down. It had been a long time since I could look into a real glass mirror, but what I saw I could have done without. My forehead was creased like the fan Olive kept in her purse. But at least I was clean; I was shaved. As soon as I got my money right, I would see a dentist and get fitted for a new bridge. Using a fluffy brown towel dangling from a hook, I dried my face and returned to the table, which Davina piled with a righteous feast.

It was like something out of the Bible. Pork chops swimming in gravy, macaroni and cheese—brown on the top and shiny with butter. Mashed potatoes heaped in a striped blue bowl and next to that a stack of the white rolls Olive used to make. When you tugged them, they came apart in buttery sections. There, snug in a shiny silver bowl, were a few of the crowder peas I had been craving.

“You want to say the blessing?” she said, reaching out for my hand.

I closed my eyes and bowed my head, but I didn’t get past “Dear Lord” when my throat started twitching. It took me two breaths to give up on talking. I clamped my eyes shut and swallowed hard against whatever it was that was trying to rise up and get out of me.

“Dear Lord,” Davina picked up. “Thank you for this food that will nourish our bodies. We thank you for this fellowship. In the name of your son, Jesus Christ, Amen.” She squeezed my hand at the Amen, like the period at the end of the sentence, but I kept squeezing, even when she tried to pull away. I managed to say, “Bless the hands that prepared it,” before I let her go.

As Davina spooned mounds of everything onto my plate, I imagined myself—a man just out of the joint, about to do some serious damage to some pork chops. I felt a little bit like a punch line, more self-conscious than I had ever been in corporate America, right here in my own hometown. Davina set the food down in front of me, and at the last moment I remembered my manners and didn’t touch my fork until she picked up hers.

“Bon appétit,” she said with a little smile.

I said it back and remembered Celestial, who said just that before she ate anything, even her morning cereal.

I was working my way through a second helping of food and a third round of sweet lemonade when Davina said in a tone that was too breezy for a question she asked twice already, “You still married?”

I slowly finished chewing, swallowed, and washed it all down with lemonade. “How you want me to answer that? This is what I got: I was married when I went in, and she didn’t divorce me.”

“You don’t have to talk in circles like a lawyer.” She seemed hurt, like I came here and ate her dinner under false pretenses.

I took a breath and gave her as much truth as I had on me. “I haven’t seen her in two years. Not since my mama passed.”

“You talk to her on the phone?”

“Not lately,” I said. “What about you? You with somebody?”

She looked around the room. “You see anybody up in here?”

We let the subject drop, like we were both satisfied that we had done our due diligence.

Gloria taught me to pray when I was three years old. She knelt beside me, showed me how to press my palms together under my chin like a cherub. Church was her thing, not my father’s. There is a certain type of Christian woman who can’t resist a godless man, keeping his soul safe on her knees. Sometimes I wish I were like her, born to save a man; then I could follow my mother’s bread crumb trail.

“Now I lay me down to sleep.” Gloria almost sang the words, and I repeated, a little baby echo, eyes screwed tight. Before “Amen,” I opened my eyes and asked her to explain “I pray the Lord my soul to take.” She said that it was up to God to see if you got to wake up the next morning, to decide if you’re afforded another day. If you died in the night, you asked to go with Him back up to heaven. Or at least this is how I took it. Stricken, I lay in my canopy bed, afraid to even blink my eyes for fear of falling into an eternal sleep.

Every night, she put me to bed this way, the two of us chanting. As she knelt beside me, I prayed the way she expected, but when Gloria had gone, I recanted, negotiating to keep my soul for myself.

Somewhere it is written that your sins fall on your parents, mostly on your mother, until you’re twelve years old. After that, your trespasses are on your own scorecard. Once I had a choice in the matter, I seldom accompanied my mother to services, preferring the easy company of my father. But always, I say my prayers.

When I lived alone, I spoke the prayers aloud, but now that Andre shares my bedroom, I move my lips around the words, but I don’t give them air. I pray for Roy. I ask for his safety. I ask for his forgiveness, although in the clean light of morning, I know I have done nothing wrong. I also pray for Andre, and I ask him to forgive me for asking for forgiveness. I pray for my father, and I pray that I’ll figure out how to be his daughter again.

My mother taught me that we have no secrets from God. He knows our feelings because He made them. When you confess your sins, He will bless you for your courage. He will bless you for your humility. He blesses you when you’re on your knees.

God must know that in the bottom of my jewelry case, snapped into a felt box, is Roy’s missing tooth. A root woman would know what to do with it; even I, not talented in the unseen, can feel its blazing comet energy in the palm of my hand. But I have no way to harness this power or command it to my will.

I spent about thirty-six hours straight with Davina Hardrick in what used to be Miss Annie Mae’s house. Life is full of wonders. Who would have predicted that a girl I knew only a little bit in high school would capture me so completely that I hardly remembered my way home? The only reason I left her bed at all was that she put me out so she could go to work. Between her good cooking and her good loving, I could have stayed there forever. When I finally showed up in the rumpled clothes I had been wearing (or not wearing) for the last day and a half, Big Roy was waiting on the front porch. The two Huey Newton chairs stood unoccupied while he sat on the concrete floor with his legs hanging over the side, his feet planted in the flower beds. His left hand was curled around my mama’s yellow coffee cup and the other was gripping a honey bun he ate straight from the wrapper. “You alive?”

“Yes, sir,” I said, bounding up the stairs. “Alive and well.”

Big Roy pulled his eyebrows up a couple of inches. “What’s her name?”

“I am sworn to secrecy to protect the innocent.”

“Long as she’s not married. I would hate to see you go through all you been through just to get shot by some hard-leg over a woman.”

“You’re right. My story is tragic enough as it is.”

“More coffee is on the stove,” he said, jerking his head in the direction of the front door.

I fixed myself a cup, then returned to the porch and sat down next to my father. I looked up and down the road thinking about myself, a habit I picked up when I was gone. You sit there thinking about where you want to be, who you want to be with. What you wish you could eat. I used to sit there for as long as twenty minutes or so thinking about Kalamata olives and what I would eat them on. Now I was thinking about Davina and wondering if I could go back over there tonight.

Was I cheating on Celestial, or was I cheating on my memories of her? I suppose a man in my position should receive some sort of special consideration. I won’t say that Davina Hardrick saved my life with her plush thighs and her “baby” language, but she salvaged my something, if not my life, maybe my spirit.

Big Roy spoke over the rim of the yellow coffee cup. “You need to learn how to use the telephone, son. You can’t just disappear. Not after everything that has happened.”

I felt my shoulders round as I tucked my head almost to my chest. “I’m sorry, Daddy. I didn’t think about it.”

“You got to remember how to consider about other people.”

“I know.” I slurped some more coffee, and he handed me the half-eaten honey bun. I tore it in two pieces and stuffed the sweet bread in my mouth. “Trying to get used to being myself.”

Big Roy said, “You need to get in touch with your wife today. Let her know.”

“Let her know what?”

“Not about whoever got you over here grinning like Jiminy Cricket. But you got to let her know you’re back home. Trust me on this, son. Whoever you been with, she may seem special right now, but she’s not your wife.”

I threw my hands up. “I know. I know.” I hadn’t had a little scrap of happiness in five entire years and he wasn’t even going to let me have an hour of basking in the sun.

“But wait until you wash up,” he said.

He was right. I needed to make some plans to get back to Atlanta, to greet Celestial skin-to-skin and ask her whether we were still married. A part of me said, if you have to ask, the answer is no. Maybe I was setting myself up. Two years of no visits is a message; why did I need to hear it from her own lips? Whatever she had to say for herself would draw blood, and it wouldn’t be a clean cut. The truth would hurt jagged, like a dog bite.

But there was still the simple and undisputed fact that she didn’t divorce me. If she didn’t get out of the marriage officially, it was only because she didn’t want to. That carried some weight in my book. Besides, even a dog bite can heal.

When the phone started ringing, I hadn’t gotten dressed any further than my shorts. The outdated telephone rang with a loud metallic jangle. “Tell Wickliffe I’m waiting on the porch,” Big Roy shouted from outside.

Pussyfooting to the kitchen, half-naked and barefoot, I picked up the phone and said, “He’s waiting on the porch.”

The man on the other end said, “Excuse me?”

I said, “Sorry. Hello? Hamilton residence.”

The man on the other end said, “Roy, is that you?”

“Little Roy. You want Big Roy?”

“It’s Andre. What are you doing answering the phone? I thought you weren’t getting out until Wednesday.”

The last time I saw Dre, he wore the gray suit he would wear to Olive’s wake. I could feel the crowd in the visitors’ room watching him as we talked, trying to figure out the deal with us. I knew how I looked: like everyone else in there, worn jumpsuit, black skin. Everything else about me was details. In his dress clothes, Dre didn’t look like a lawyer; he presented more like a musician who moved to Europe because “cats in the States don’t get jazz.”

I had been glad to see him. Dre was my boy. He introduced me to Celestial the first time, even though it didn’t take until much later. When we got married, he stood up with me, signed his name. Now here he was on the last Sunday Olive would be aboveground.

“Will you carry her for me?” I asked.

Dre breathed deep and nodded.

It’s painful to even recollect it, but when he agreed, I felt thankful and furious all at once. “I appreciate you,” I said.

He whisked my words away with his piano-player fingers. “I’m sorry about all of this. You know, Banks is still working… .”

Now it was my turn to wave him quiet. “Fuck Banks. Even if he got me out tomorrow, it would be too late. My mama is already dead.”

Hearing his voice now, I felt that same mix of shame and rage I felt when he said he would carry Olive’s casket. It made my throat itch, and I had to clear it twice before I spoke.

“What’s up, Dre? Good to hear from you.”

“Likewise, man,” he said. “But you’re early. We weren’t expecting you for a few more days.”

We, he said. We weren’t expecting you.

“Paperwork,” I said. “Bureaucracy. Someone in the Department of Corrections said it was time for me to go and so I went.”

“I hear you,” said Dre. “Does Celestial know?”

“Not yet,” I said.

“No problem,” Dre said after a beat. “I hope you don’t mind holding steady for a couple of days.”

“Y’all are driving down together?”

“Just me,” said Dre.

I hung up the phone and went back out to the porch and stood over Big Roy. From this angle, I could see the little scars on the top of his balding head. I remember my mother kissing them when he would whack his head on the light fixture that hung a little too low over the dining-room table. She was crazy about that dinky little chandelier, and my father never asked her to take it down.

“It wasn’t Wickliffe,” I said. “It was Andre.”

“What did he say that got you so shook up that you’re standing outside in your drawers?”

I looked down at my bare legs, turning ashy already. “He says he’s coming down to get me. Just him.”

“That sound right to you?”

“I don’t know what’s right.”

Big Roy said, “You better get to Atlanta and see if you have any marriage left.” He paused. “If that’s what you want.”

“Hell yeah, it’s what I want.”

“I had to ask because ten minutes ago you didn’t seem so sure.”

The phone rang again and Big Roy jutted his chin toward the house. “Answer it. It’s either going to be Wickliffe or Celestial. If it’s Wickliffe, tell him I’m calling in. If it’s Celestial, you’re on your own.”

I let it jangle until she gave up.

I returned to the kitchen dressed in the best apparel Walmart had to offer, khaki pants and a knit shirt with a collar. At least I had good shoes. In the mirror, I looked like a budget Tiger Woods, but I didn’t look like an ex-con. “I want to go home.”

Big Roy was stooped in front of the refrigerator rummaging inside. “Atlanta, you mean?”

“Yeah.”

“You made up your mind quick,” he said. “Andre lit some kind of fire under you.”

“I always knew I was going to go, but I didn’t know when. Now I know that when is as soon as I can.”

“You set to drive?”

I reached in my back pocket and pulled out my wallet. After all these years in prison storage, the leather was still soft and supple. Stuck to a punch card for lattes, was my driver’s license. The photo was of the successful me; cocky and sure in my button-down shirt and burgundy tie, I grinned, showing two rows of strong square teeth. According to the state of Georgia, I was clear to drive a vehicle for another six months. The Peach State also was under the impression that I lived at 1104 Lynn Valley Road. This license was the only thing I had left from before. I held it up and let the light play off the state seal. “All set, but I don’t have a car.”

“You can take the Chrysler,” Big Roy said, opening an egg carton and finding only one lonely egg. “I need to go make groceries. Two grown men need to eat breakfast.”

“Daddy, how you going to get to work without a car?”

“Wickliffe will ride me around if I help him with gas.”

“Let me think about it.”

“I thought you said you were ready to go.”

“I said I’m thinking about it.”

“You know, sometimes you can make up with bacon what you don’t have in eggs.” Big Roy opened the fridge wider and bent himself low enough to rummage in one of the drawers. “One sorry strip of bacon. I guess you could have the egg and I could have the bacon.” He went to the cabinet and opened it, showing neat rows of tin cans. “I got it! Salmon croquettes. You eat them, right?”

I looked at Big Roy like I was meeting a stranger. His body was too large for my mother’s kitchen, but he did all right, cracking the single egg one-handed and whipping it with a dainty fork.

“What?”

“Nothing, Daddy. It’s just that the entire time I was growing up, I never knew you to touch a pot or a pan. But now you putter around the kitchen like Martha Stewart.”

“Well,” he said, with his back to me as he kept whipping that solitary egg, “losing Olive left me with two options: learn to cook or starve to death.”

“You could marry somebody else.” I hardly got the words out. “It’s legal.”

“When I want somebody else, I’ll find somebody else.” Big Roy said. “But if all I want is a meal, then I’ll cook.” He held up the can of salmon and smiled. “They don’t tell you, but a lot of foods have recipes on the back of the can to tell you how to fix it.”

I watched him for a while longer, and I wondered if this is what it meant to move on, to learn to live in a new way without someone. He was busy over the little bowl and sprinkled in some cayenne pepper. “The problem is that they don’t tell you how to season it right. It’s a smart rule of thumb to shake some pepper anytime you dealing with a can recipe.”

“Mama cooked from the top of her head,” I said.

Big Roy glugged some oil into a cast-iron skillet. “I still can’t believe she’s gone.”

When he finished cooking, he divided the food onto our plates. We each got two good-size croquettes, one-half of the bacon slice, and an orange cut into triangles.

“Bon appétit,” I said, reaching for my fork.

“O Lord,” Big Roy began, saying grace, and I set the fork down.

The food wasn’t bad. It wasn’t good, but it wasn’t bad.

“Tasty, right?” Big Roy said. “The can asked for bread crumbs, but I crunched up Ritz crackers instead. Gives a nutty flavor.”

“Yes, sir,” I said, eating my half slice of bacon in one bite.

When I was sixteen, I tried to fight my father, because I thought Evie was going to die.

The doctors had said this was it, that lupus had finally gotten her, so we were going through the phases of grief in double time, trying to come out the other side before the clock ran out. I got as far as anger and drove to Carlos’s house and punched his jaw as he worked in his front yard, clipping the shrubbery into globes. His son—my brother, I guess you would call him—tried to jump in and help, but he was small and I pushed him to the grass. “Evie is dying,” I said to my father, who refused to lift his fists to hit me back. I punched him again, this time in the chest, and when I pulled my arm back again, he blocked the blow, but he didn’t strike me. Instead, he shouted my name, freezing me in place.

My little brother was on his feet now, looking from me to our father, awaiting instructions. Carlos, in an affectionate tone I’d never heard from him, said, “Go on in the house, Tyler.” Then to me he said, “Time you wasted driving over here and fighting me, you could be spending with Evie.”

I said, “That’s all you have to say about it?”

He spread his hands like suffer the little children. At his neck, I made out the glint of a braided chain. Hidden under his shirt was a gold disc the size of a quarter. His mother had given it to him a lifetime ago and he never took it off.

“What do you want me to say?” He asked the question mildly, like he actually wanted to know.

And it was a good question. After all these years, what could he say? That he was sorry?

“I want you to say that you don’t want her to die.”

“Jesus, boy. No, I don’t want Evie to die. I always assumed that eventually we would work it out, get back to being friends some kinda way. I thought that down the line we could patch things up. She’s a remarkable woman. Look at yourself. She raised you. I’ll always owe her for that.”

I know it’s a very humble declaration, but it felt like a gift.

A week later, Evie rallied and was moved out of ICU to a regular room on the hospital’s third floor. On her night table rested a cheery bouquet, a half-dozen pink roses and some green leaves. She invited me to read the card. Feel better. Sincerely, Carlos. After that, things between us improved a little. Out of kindness, he now extends invitations to holiday dinners, and out of kindness, I refuse. Any day now, I should receive a Christmas card, and tucked inside will be a chipper letter from his wife. I don’t read these annual bulletins; I can’t stomach her reports on how healthy and thriving her children are. I don’t begrudge them anything, but I don’t know them.

This is one thing I envied Roy: his dad. It wasn’t that I had never seen anybody with a responsible father before. After all, I grew up right next door to Celestial and Mr. Davenport. But a man who is a father to a daughter is different from one who is a father to a son. One is the left shoe and the other is the right. They are the same but not interchangeable.

I don’t think about Carlos all the time, like some kind of tragic black man who grew up without a daddy and is warped for life. Evie did right by me and I’m a basically solid person. But sitting behind the steering wheel of my truck, stranded in the middle lane of an eight-lane highway, I wanted to talk to my dad. Roy Hamilton was out of prison, seven years early. Not that this changed the dynamic tremendously, but the accelerated clock churned my guts and spun my head.

I longed for a mentor or maybe a coach. When I was a kid, Mr. Davenport would step in from time to time, but now he acts like he can’t stand my face. Evie clucked her tongue and said that no man likes the rusty-butt who is laying up next to his daughter. I tried to explain to her that it was deeper than that. Evie said, “Was he loving all over Roy before he got sent away?” No, he hadn’t been, but that was irrelevant. Now Mr. Davenport was loyal to Roy above his own daughter. In a way, the whole black race was loyal to Roy, a man just down from the cross.

“Stop by anytime,” my father had said casually last year when I ran into him and his wife in Kroger on Cascade Road. He was pushing a buggy heaped with chicken, ribs, Irish potatoes, brown sugar, red soda pop, and everything else you need for a barbecue. He saw me before I saw him, or else we never would have talked. As his wife conveniently drifted off to the salad bar, Carlos placed his hand on my arm and said, “It has been too long.”

How does this happen to families? I’ve seen the pictures. There I am, riding on his shoulders, afro like Little Michael Jackson. I remember day-to-day things like him teaching me how to pee without splashing the floor. I even recall the sting of his belt against my legs, but not often. He used to be my father, and now we never talk at all. It occurs to me that maybe a man can love his son only as much as he loves the mother. But no, that couldn’t be true. He was my father. I wasn’t his junior, but I wore his last name as easily as I wore my own skin.

“You’re always welcome in my home,” he had said.

And so I decided to take him at his word.

I don’t believe that blood makes a family; kin is the circle you create, hands held tight. There is something to shared genetics, but the question is, what exactly is that something? It matters that I didn’t grow up with my father. It’s kind of like having one leg that’s a half inch shorter than the other. You can walk, but there will be a dip.

carlos lives on Brownlee Road in a house almost identical to the one where he lived with my mother and me. It was like he wanted the same life, but with different people. His wife, Jeanette, even favored Evie a little bit, redbone with a generous build. When they first got married, Jeanette somehow managed to make a living making ice sculptures for weddings and such. Back then, she had been much younger than Evie, but after all these years, their ages have come together in that uncanny way of passing time.

Carlos answered the door shirtless, with his bald head covered with shaving foam. As he used a nubby towel to blot his forehead, the gold Saint Christopher medal gleamed bright against his dark chest hair. “Andre, everything okay, my man?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I was wondering if I could talk to you right quick.” When he paused, I added, “You said I could come by anytime.”

He opened the door wide to let me in. “Of course. Come on in. I’m getting dressed.” Then he announced to whoever was home, “Andre’s here.”

I stepped inside and was met with the scent of breakfast—bacon, coffee, and something sweet, like cinnamon buns. Before me in the foyer stood a Christmas tree, pine-scented and littered with shiny silver balls. Already, dozens of glittery gifts rested upon a red cloth trimmed in white, like Santa Claus. And like a child, I worried that there wasn’t a present there for me; then like an adult, I worried that I shouldn’t have come by empty-handed.

“Nice tree, isn’t it,” he said. “I let Jeanette handle the decorations. I haul it in, that’s all a man can do.” He bent and connected a green wire to the wall and the tree was ablaze with white lights so clean and radiant that they glowed, even in the sunny room.

Just then Jeanette appeared, dressed in a kimono the color of peacocks. Arranging her hair, she said, “Hello, Andre. It’s nice to see you.”

“It’s nice to see you, too, ma’am.”

“Don’t ‘ma’am’ me,” she said. “We’re family. Will you join us for breakfast?”

“No, ma’am,” I said.

She kissed my father on the cheek, as if to remind me that this is her house, her husband, and the father of her children. Or maybe it was affection, still blooming after all these years. Whatever it was, I felt disloyal to Evie just being there, even though my mother has been much more relaxed on the subject now that she has found true love of her own.

“C’mon with me while I finish up with this head.” He pointed at the froth on his dome. “When I was young, ladies knew me for my hair. Half black and half Puerto Rican? Jet black and waves for days. A little pomade and a wet comb? Perfection. But now?” He sighed as if to say, Nothing lasts.

I trailed him through the house, which was quiet but for the pots and pans clanging in the kitchen.

“Where are the kids?” I asked.

“College,” my father said. “They both get in tonight.”

“Where did they go?”

“Tyler is at Oberlin and Mikayla is at Duke. I tried to get them to go to black schools, but …” He shook his head as though he didn’t remember agreeing to pay for my college only if I went to the school of his choice.

In the bathroom he situated himself between two mirrors and carefully scraped the foam from his head. “Michael Jordan was the best thing that ever happened to black men my age. We can shave our heads and say we’re bald on purpose.”

I studied our reflections in the mirror. My father was a good-size man. There is a picture of him holding me as a newborn, and against his chest, I look to be no bigger than a hickory nut. He must be sixty by now. His muscular bulk has softened some. On his chest, on the left side, is a keloid scar to honor his fraternity. Seeing me looking at it, my father covered it with his hand. “I’m embarrassed by this now.”

“I’m embarrassed that I didn’t pledge,” I said.

“Don’t be. I’ve learned a few things over these last thirty years.”

He returned to the business of shaving his head, and I regarded myself in the mirror. It was as though God knew that Evie would end up raising me alone, so he made me entirely in her image. Wide nose, healthy lips, and hair the color of cardboard but nappy as Africa. The only trait I picked up from my father was cheekbones that jutted like collarbones.

“So,” he said, stretching the word out like a drum roll. “What’s on your mind?”

“I’m getting married,” I said.

“Who is the lucky lady?”

I stumbled, surprised that he didn’t know, probably in the same way he was surprised that I didn’t know where his kids were in college. “Celestial. Celestial Davenport.”

“Aha!” he said. “I peeped that when you were babies. Did she grow up fine like her mama? But wait a minute. Wasn’t she married to some dude that ended up being a rapist? Morehouse cat. Was he Greek?”

“But he was innocent.”

“Who said he was innocent? Her? If she’s still claiming he didn’t do it, then you have a real problem.” Meeting my eyes in the mirror, he adopted a thoughtful tone. “Forgive me for being such a straight shooter. Nowadays they say it’s being direct, but your mama called it being an asshole.” He chuckled. “I’ve been down here in the South thirty-eight years, but I still run my mouth like a New Yorker.”

When he said New Yorker, he switched his accent like he was speaking a word in another language.

“You don’t have all the details,” I said, feeling defensive of both Celestial and Roy. “That’s what I’m here to tell you about. The lawyer got his conviction overturned. He’s out right now. I’m on my way to Louisiana to see him.”

My father put down the razor, rinsed it at the sink. He closed the lid on the toilet and sat upon it like a throne. He beckoned, so I sat opposite him on the rim of the spacious bathtub. “And you’re talking about marrying his ex-wife. I see the challenge.”

“She’s not his ex-wife,” I said. “Not technically.”

“Whoa, doggie,” Carlos said. “I knew it had to be something to bring you over here to talk to me.”

I told him the whole story from soup to nuts, and when I was done, my father pinched the bridge of his nose like he felt a migraine coming on.

“This is my fault,” he said with closed eyes. “This never would have happened if you were trained up under me. I would have taught you to steer clear of a snake pit like this. There can’t be a winner. First off, you should have sense enough not to mess with that man’s wife. But,” he said with a courtly nod, “who am I to judge? When I got with Jeanette, I didn’t have no business doing it. Evie put me out. Granted, I had someplace to go, but it was her call. You know that, right? I didn’t leave her.” He ran his finger over his damp head, feeling for stubbly patches that he skipped over with this razor.

“This isn’t what I came over here for.”

“Then what did you come for?”

“Obviously, I need advice. Guidance. Words of wisdom, something.”

“Well,” he said, “I have been one of the legs in a love triangle, this you know. You also know that there isn’t a happy ending for anyone. I miss your mother every day. We grew up together, too. But she can’t be in the same room with Jeanette and—”

“You could have come to visit us by yourself.”

“Jeanette is my wife now. Then we had Tyler and Mikayla. You can’t say that I made a choice, because your mother was the one who put me out. Don’t forget that.”

“Enough,” I said. “Enough of this historical shit. She put you out because you were chasing tail. She put you out and you married tail, and then you want to blame it on her. What about me? I didn’t put you out. I was in second grade.”

The air in the closed bathroom was warm, despite the noisy exhaust fan. His shaving cream smelled like cloves and made me feel nauseous. What was I even doing here? My father didn’t know me, he didn’t know Celestial, and he didn’t know Roy. How could he steer me in this storm?

From the other side of our silence, Jeanette sang, “Breakfast is ready!”

“C’mon, Dre,” my father said. “Have some eggs and bacon.”

“I didn’t come here hoping for a seat at your table.”

Carlos stuck his head out into the hallway, “I’m coming, Jeanette.” Then he turned to me, with a buzz of urgency like he had bought himself only another minute or so. “Let’s start over,” he said. “You say you want my advice. Here’s what I have. Tell the truth. Don’t try to cushion the blow. If you’re bad enough to do it, you’re bad enough to tell it. You can ask your mama. She’ll tell you she was so unhappy because I didn’t drop lies into her morning coffee. The whole time, she knew exactly who she was married to.

“You go let that man know what you have done, what you’re still doing. That’s all he’s entitled to. You don’t tell him with your chin on your chest. You tell him to inform him, for him to see the kind of man you are—however he sizes it up.”

“Then what do I do?”

“Depends on what he does. My guess is that he gets physical. I don’t think he’ll kill you over it. He’s not trying to get reincarcerated. But, son, you got a real ass whooping coming. Just take it and get on with your life.”

“But—”

“Here’s the ‘but,’ ” he said. “The good news is that he can whip your ass all up and down the state of Louisiana, but it doesn’t matter. He can’t beat Celestial out of you. It’s not a to-the-victors proposition.”

Then he laughed. I didn’t.

“Okay, son, I’m going to get serious. Just because I think you deserve what you’re about to go to Louisiana to get, it doesn’t mean that I don’t wish you well with Celeste. Every relationship requires that you go through some shit.” He ran his fingers over the figure scarring his chest. “This was stupid. We branded each other like cattle. Like slaves. We beat the shit out of each other. But it bound us together. I love every single one of them. When I tell you we went through it, I mean it. Maybe what has held me and Jeanette together all these years is what I had to go through and give up to be with her.”

And with that, he opened the bathroom door and we walked out into the cheerful house. In the hallway, I zipped my jacket against December and headed toward the doorway, past the twinkling tree. Something in me that was still very young hung back in case a gift was set aside, in case he had remembered me for the holidays.

“Come back Christmas,” he said. “There will be a box under the tree for you.”

My face burned at being so transparent, and because I shared Evie’s coloring, he could see it.

I turned away, but my father spun my shoulder. “I never forgot about you,” he said. “Not during the year and never at Christmas. I just wasn’t expecting to see you.” Then he patted his pockets like he was hoping to find something there. Downhearted, he lifted his gold necklace over his clean-shaven head. “My ma bought it in Chinatown when I finished high school. Other boys got typewriters to take to college, or maybe a briefcase, stuff like that, and she gives me a saint. Saint Christopher is for safe travels and buena suerte for bachelors.” He kissed the engraved face before holding it out to me. “I hate that you didn’t get to meet her. There is nothing like a Puerto Rican grandmother. A summer or two in East Harlem would have got you right.” He bounced the gold in his palm like dice. “Look, it’s yours. It says so in my will. But I don’t see why you have to wait.”

My father took my wrist and forced the jewelry into my hand, squeezing my fingers around it with so much force it hurt.

Good-bye” isn’t my strong suit; I’m more of a “see you later” kind of person. When I left prison, I didn’t even say good-bye to Walter. He picked a fight on the yard and got himself put into the SHU the day before my release. As I gathered all my belongings and stacked it all on Walter’s side of the cell, I wondered if maybe good-bye wasn’t his forte either. Missing him in advance, I wrote a note on the first page of the notebook I was leaving behind.

Dear Walter,

When the door is open, you have to run through it. I will stay in touch. You have been a good father to me these years.

Your son,

Roy

Before this, I had never called myself his son. I meant it, but I was struck by a silly fear that Big Roy would find out or even that Olive would know from the grave. But I let the note stay put. On his pillow, I left a picture that Celestial sent of me and her on the beach in Hilton Head. Other men had pictures of their kids, why shouldn’t Walter? Your son, Roy, that’s who I was.

Now it was time to pay my respects to Olive, down at what used to be called the “colored cemetery.” This graveyard dated back to the 1800s, to right after slavery ended. Mr. Fontenot took me here once to rub etchings off the crumbling tombstones; now he was under this ground himself. There were other places to be buried; these days cemeteries are integrated along with everything else, but I never knew of anyone who didn’t choose to lay their family down at Greater Rest Memorial.

Big Roy sent me on my way with a big bouquet of yellow flowers wrapped with green holiday ribbon. I drove the Chrysler along the potholed road in the middle of the cemetery and stopped when the pavement ended. Exiting the car, I walked ten paces to the east and then six to the south, with my flowers behind my back like it was Valentine’s Day.

I passed trendy grave markers engraved with the likeness of the person buried below. These stones were shiny like Cadillacs, and the faces transferred onto rock were almost all young guys. I paused at one, covered with pink lipstick kisses, and did the math in my head: fifteen years old. I thought of Walter again. “Six or twelve,” he sometimes said when he was depressed, which wasn’t all the time but often enough that I recognized a blue mood when it was settling in. “That’s your fate as a black man. Carried by six or judged by twelve.”

Using Big Roy’s directions like they were a pirate’s map, I turned right at the pecan tree and I found Olive’s resting place, exactly where he promised it would be.

The dusky gray of her tombstone dropped me to my knees. I landed hard on the packed dark earth where grass grew only in determined little patches. Across the top of the stone was etched our family name. Underneath was olive ann and to the right of that roy. I lost my breath, thinking a grave had already been laid for me, but then I realized that this resting place beside my mother was my father’s. I know Big Roy and I imagine he figured that he may as well get his name on there since he already hired the stonecutter. When it came time to bury him, I wouldn’t be charged for anything but the date. I ran my hands over both their names and I wondered where I would be planted when the time came. It was crowded in the cemetery. Olive had neighbors on all sides.

On my knees, I stuffed the flowers into the tarnished metal vase affixed to the stone, but I didn’t stand. “Pray,” Big Roy had said. “Tell her what you need her to hear.” I didn’t even know where to start.

“Mama,” I said, and then the crying came. I had not cried since I was sentenced and I had humiliated myself before a judge who didn’t care. On that horrible day, my snotty sobbing had merged with Celestial and Olive’s mournful accompaniment. Now I suffered a cappella; the weeping burned my throat like when you vomit up strong liquor. That one word, Mama, was my only prayer as I thrashed on the ground like I was feeling the Holy Ghost, only what I was going through wasn’t rapture. I spasmed on that cold black earth in pain, physical pain. My joints hurt; I experienced what felt like a baton against the back of my head. It was like I relived every injury of my entire life. The pain went on until it didn’t, and I sat up, dirty and spent.

“Thank you,” I whispered to the air and to Olive. “Thank you for making it stop. And for being my mother. And for taking such loving care of me.” And then I was still, hoping to maybe hear something in return, a message in a birdsong. Anything. But it was quiet. I gathered myself and stood up, dusting the dirt off my khakis the best I could. I laid my hand on the tombstone. “Bye,” I mumbled, because I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

I was at the BP station, filling up my daddy’s Chrysler with gas, when I finally heard what I think was my mama’s voice in my ear. Any fool can up and go. Whenever she started saying what “any fool” could do, she followed up with how a “real man” would handle the problem. Another favorite of hers was talking about what dogs were capable of. As in, “Even a dog can make a bunch of puppies, but a real man raises his kids.” She made dozens of those observations. She aimed them at me constantly and I did my best to be the real man she had in mind. But she never told me anything about saying good-bye, because as far as she was concerned, real men didn’t have any need for farewells because real men stay.

With the gas nozzle in my hand, I paused to hear if she had any more wisdom to share, but apparently that was all I was going to get.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said aloud, and turned the Chrysler in the direction of the Hardwood.

I owed Davina Hardrick a real good-bye and some kind of thanks, too. Maybe I should give it to her straight and point out that she would be smart to rid herself of me, damaged goods that I was. I wasn’t what they call “relationship material.” All that was the truth, and I wouldn’t even have to mention Celestial. But even as I was going over this in my head, I knew it wasn’t going to be as easy as that. What transpired between Davina and me was sexual, but it was more than that. It wasn’t on the level of me and Celestial when we were trying to have a baby. It was kind of like dancing late at night when you’re so drunk that the beat is in charge, so you look the woman in the eyes and you both move to the music the same way. That was part of how it was, and the other part was that she fucked me back to health. I would never actually say that—some words women don’t care to hear—but that’s what happened. Sometimes the only thing that can cure a man is the inside of a woman, the right woman who does things the right way. This is what I should thank her for.

When I arrived at her place, I rang the doorbell and waited, but I knew she wasn’t there. I contemplated dropping a note, kind of like the one I left for Walter, but that didn’t feel right. A Dear John was bad, and a Dear Jane was worse. This wasn’t about me trying not to be cliché. It was about me trying to remember how to be a human being. How you would go about paying somebody back for reminding me what it felt like to be a man and not a nigger just out of the joint? What kind of currency would make us even? I didn’t have anything to give but my sorry self. My sorry married self, to be a little more exact.

I went back to the car, turned over the ignition, and flipped on the heat. I couldn’t sit there until she got back, wasting time I couldn’t afford to lose and burning gas I couldn’t afford to waste. I rummaged through the glove compartment and found a golf pencil and small pad. I should at least use a full-size sheet of paper if I was going to leave a note. I got out of the car and searched the trunk, but there was nothing in it but my duffel bag and an atlas. I sat on the fender, using the palm of my hand as a desk as I tried to think about what to write. Dear Davina, Thank you very much for two days of restorative sex. I feel much better now. I knew better than to even press pencil to paper with that idea.

“She at work,” said a voice behind me.

There stood a little knucklehead about five or six years old, a felt Santa hat crooked on his peanut head.

“You talking about Davina?”

He nodded and forced a candy cane into a sour pickle wrapped in cellophane.

“You know what time she’s coming back?”

He nodded and sucked on the pickle and peppermint.

“Can you tell me what time that is?”

He shook his head no.

“Why?”

“Because it might not be your business.”

“Justin!” said a woman from the porch next door, where the French teacher once lived.

“I wasn’t talking to him,” Justin said. “He was the one talking to me.”

To the woman on Mr. Fontenot’s porch, I explained, “I’m trying to find Davina. Justin said she’s at work and I was wondering what time she would be home.”

The woman, whom I took to be Justin’s grandmother, was tall and dark-skinned. Her hair, white at the temples, was braided across the top of her head, like a basket. “How do I know it’s your business?”

Justin smirked at me.

“She’s my friend,” I said. “I’m leaving town and I wanted to say good-bye.”

“You could leave her a note,” she said. “I’ll give it to her.”

“She deserves more than a note,” I said.

The grandmother raised her eyebrows like she figured out what I was talking about. Not a see you later but a true farewell. “It’s Christmastime. She won’t get off until midnight.”

I couldn’t spend the whole day waiting for the opportunity to disappoint Davina in person; it was 4:25 p.m., and I needed to get on the road. I thanked the grandmother and Justin before getting back in the car and headed toward Walmart.

I walked through the store, scanning all the aisles until I found Davina in the back, near the craft supplies, cutting off a length of something blue and fuzzy for a thin man wearing glasses. “Give me another yard,” he said, and she flipped the bolt a couple of times and whacked at it with a pair of large scissors. She noticed me as she was folding the fabric and attaching the price tag. Handing it to the man, she smiled at me, and I felt like the worst person in the world.

When the man walked away, I advanced to the table like I, too, needed something measured and cut.

“Can I help you, sir,” she said, smiling like this was some kind of holiday game.

“Hey, Davina,” I said. “Can I talk to you for a minute?”

“You okay?” she asked, eyeing my dirty clothes. “Did something happen?”

“Naw,” I said. “I just didn’t get a chance to change. But I need to talk to you right quick.”

“I don’t have a break coming up, but grab some fabric and come back. I can talk to you here.”

The fabrics, arranged by color, reminded me of Saturdays with my mother, the way she would drag me to Cloth World in Alexandria. Grabbing a bolt of red fabric flecked with gold, I returned to the cutting table and handed it to Davina, who immediately started pulling the cloth free.

“Sometimes people ask how much we have so we have to measure it all. So I’ll do that while you talk. What’s up? You here to say you miss me?” She smiled again.

“I’m here to say that I’m going to miss you,” I said.

“Where you going?”

“Back to Atlanta.”

“For how long?”

“I don’t know.”

“You going back to her?”

I nodded.

“That was your plan the whole time, wasn’t it?”

She snatched hard at the cloth until the spool was bare and the fabric was stretched out on the table, looking like a movie-star red carpet. She measured it against the yardstick at the edge of the table, counting under her breath.

“I don’t mean it like that,” I said.

“I distinctly asked you if you were married.”

“And I told you I didn’t know.”

“You didn’t act like you didn’t know.”

“I want to say thank you. That’s why I’m here, to say thank you and good-bye.”

Davina said, “I want to say fuck you. How about that?”

“What we did was special,” I said, feeling like a jackass, although I had not uttered a single lie. “I care about you. Don’t be like this.”

“I can be however I want.” She was mad, but I could see that she was trying not to cry. “Go on then, Roy. Go on back to Miss Atlanta. But I want two things from you.”

“Okay,” I said, eager to do something and show her that I was cooperating, that I didn’t want to hurt her.

“Don’t scandalize my name by talking about how when you got out of jail you were so desperate that you knocked off some girl from Walmart. Don’t say that to your friends.”

“I wouldn’t say that. It wasn’t like that.”

She held up her hand. “I mean it. Don’t taste my name in your mouth. And Roy Hamilton, promise me you will not ever come banging on my door.”

Is it love, or is it convenience?” Gloria asked me that Thanksgiving Day after my father had stormed upstairs and Andre went to gather our coats. She explained that convenience, habit, comfort, obligation—these are all things that wear the same clothing as love sometimes. Did I think this thing with Andre was maybe too easy? He is literally the boy next door.

If my mother were here now, she would see that what we had chosen was anything but convenient. It was Christmastime, and I own a business with a staff of two, and now my wrongfully incarcerated husband is released and I have to tell him that I’m engaged to another man. The situation was a lot of things—tragic, absurd, unlikely, and maybe even unethical—but it was not convenient.

As Andre ran his lines, rehearsing the speech that we agreed would explain ourselves to Roy as gently as possible, I looked up into the empty branches and wondered aloud how long Old Hickey had been here. Our houses were constructed in 1967. As soon as the last brick was mortared into place, our parents moved in and commenced making babies, but Old Hickey predated all of that. When workers cleared the land to build, scores of pine trees were cut down and the stumps blasted from the ground. Only Old Hickey had been spared.

Andre slapped his hand against the rough bark. “Only way to tell is to cut it down and count the rings. I don’t want to know that bad. The answer is old. Hickey has seen it all.”

“You ready?” I asked him.

“There’s no ready,” Dre said, leaning back on the tree and pulling me close. I didn’t resist and pushed my fingers through his dense hair. I leaned to kiss his neck, but he gripped my shoulders and held me away so we could see each other’s faces. His eyes reflected back the grays and browns of winter. “You’re scared,” he said. “I can feel shaking beneath your skin. Talk to me, Celestial.”

“It’s real,” I said. “What we have is real. It’s not just convenience.”

“Baby,” Dre said. “Love is supposed to be convenient. It’s supposed to be easy. Don’t they say that in First Corinthians?” He held me close against him again. “It’s real. It’s convenient. It’s perfect.”

“Do you think Roy will come back with you?”

“He might. He might not,” Andre said.

“What would you do if you were him?”

Andre let me go and stepped over the raised roots of the tree. The air was chilly but clean. “I can’t say because I can’t imagine being him. I’ve tried, but I can’t even walk around the corner in his shoes, let alone a mile. Sometimes I think that if I were him, I would be a gentleman, wishing you well and letting you go with dignity.”

I shook my head. Roy wasn’t that type of man, although he had dignity in spades. But for a person like Roy, letting go wasn’t a self-respecting option. Gloria once told me that your best quality is also your worst. For herself, she identified her ability to adapt. “I’ve likely rolled with punches when I should have hit back,” she said. “But I rolled my way into a life I love.” She told me that since I was very small, I have embraced my appetites. “You always run toward what you want. Your father always tries to break you of this, but you are just like him, brilliant but impulsive and a tiny bit selfish. But more women should be selfish,” she said. “Or else the world will trample you.” Roy, in my mind, was a fighter, a characteristic whose double edges were gleaming and sharp.

“But I don’t really know,” Andre said, thinking aloud. “He feels like everything was taken from him—his job, his house, his wife—and he wants all his shit back. He can’t get his job back; corporate America waits for no man, let alone a black man. But he’s going to want his marriage back, like you have been in cold storage all these years. So now it’s my job to snatch the fantasy away.” He motioned to take in our houses, our bodies, maybe even our city. “I feel guilty as hell. I can’t lie.”

“Me, too,” I said.

“For what?” he asked, slipping his arms around my waist.

“Since I could remember, my father has told me how lucky I was. How I never had to struggle. How I eat every day. How nobody has ever called me ‘nigger’ to my face. He used to say, ‘Accident of birth is the number one predictor of happiness.’ Once Daddy took me to the emergency room at Grady, so I could see how poor black folks are treated when they got sick. Gloria was mad when I came home, eight years old, shook to the bone. But he said, ‘I don’t mind living in Cascade Heights, but she needs to know the whole picture.’ Gloria was furious. ‘She is not a sociological test case. She is our daughter.’ Daddy said, ‘Our daughter needs to know things, she needs to know how fortunate she is. When I was her age …’ My mother cut him off. ‘Stop it, Franklin. This is how progress works. You have it better than your daddy and I have it better than mine. Don’t treat her like she stole something.’ To which my daddy said, ‘I’m not saying that she stole it. I just want her to know what she has.’ ”

Dre shook his head as though my memories were his own. “You deserve your life. There are no accidents—of birth or anything else.”

Then I kissed him hard and sent him on his way to Louisiana, like I was sending him off to war.

PO Box 973

Eloe, LA 98562

Dear Walter,

Hello from the other side. Ignore the return address on this letter because I don’t know where I’ll be by the time you get this. Right now, I’m in a rest stop outside of Gulfport, Mississippi, where I’m going to get a room for tonight. Tomorrow morning, I’ll head to Atlanta to find Celestial and see if I have any life left there. It could go either way. I don’t think I’m making too much of the fact that she didn’t divorce me, and this time tomorrow I will know.

I have money in my pocket, and I’m grateful for that. When I was a boy, I had a little savings account. I went to the branch this past Tuesday to clean it out, and there I experienced a minor miracle. Olive stopped adding to my commissary after it was clear that Celestial was handling that, so she started saving for my future. The money she made from selling cakes on Saturdays, she put away for me, so I have nearly $3,500. This means I don’t have to show up on Celestial’s doorstep like a homeless person. But that’s what I am, I guess. But at least I don’t have to be a broke homeless person.

Celestial doesn’t know that I’m coming and I’m glad that I don’t have to hear your wisdom on that! It’s complicated, but she sent Andre to Eloe to come and collect me. By my calculations, he should be hitting the highway first thing tomorrow morning. This is why I didn’t tell her I was coming. I need to see her by herself, not with Dre hanging around. I’m not saying that there is anything between them, but I’m saying that there has always been something between them. You know what I mean? Or am I the one being a Junior Yoda? But the point is that I need to talk to her without anyone blocking. So if he drives way out to Louisiana, it will take him another day to get back. So that gives me two days to get done what I need to do.

Admit it. It’s a smart plan.

Maybe I am your kid after all.

Anyway, I’m going to put some of this money on your books. Don’t spend it all in one place (ha!). And take care of yourself. And if you can, pray for your boy.

Roy O.

Andre

I used to see him sometimes, so I had become accustomed to the stuttered breath, the dancing hairs on my suddenly cold arms and neck. You can live with ghosts. Gloria says that her mother returned to her every Sunday morning for over a year. Gloria would be looking in the mirror rouging her lips, and over her left shoulder was her mother, freshly buried, but alive again in the glass. Sometimes she hoisted me on her hip. “Do you see your nana?” All I could see was my own reflection, ribboned and ready for Sunday school. “It’s okay,” Gloria said. “She can see you.” My father thinks this is ridiculous. His denomination, he says, is Empiricism. If you can’t count it, measure it, or gauge it with science, it didn’t happen. Gloria didn’t mind that he didn’t believe her because she enjoyed having her mirror mother all to herself.

I never glimpsed Roy’s face in a pan of water or scorched into a slice of toast. My husband’s ghost showed itself in the guise of other men, almost always young, haircuts Easter sharp year-round. They didn’t always share his physical attributes; no, they were as diverse as humanity. But I recognized them by the ambition that clung to their skins like spicy cologne, the slight breeze of power that stirred the air, and finally, a mourning that left my mouth tasting of ash.

On the eve of Christmas Eve, Andre was burning up the interstate heading west, then south, to do my duty. I should have known better than to send a man to do a woman’s job. But he insisted, “Let me do this for you,” and I was relieved. I don’t know what has happened to me. I used to be brave.

As we danced at my wedding reception, my father had said, “Let the man be the man sometimes.”

Giddy with love and champagne, I laughed at him. “What does that even mean? Let him stand up to pee?”

Daddy said, “At some point you will come to accept your limitations.”

“Do you accept yours?” I asked, with challenge in my voice.

“But of course, Ladybug. That’s what marriage teaches you.”

And I laughed at that, too, as he spun me dizzy. “Not my marriage. It’s going to be different.”

On the eve of Christmas Eve-Eve, I packed Andre’s overnight bag with clean clothes, blister packs of remedies in case he was struck with a headache, insomnia, or flu. Early the next morning I stood in the driveway as he rolled away, careful not to cut his wheels and hurt the lawn, December brown but alive underneath. My legs tensed like they wanted to chase him and bring him back to my warm kitchen, but my arm waved and my lips said good-bye.

And then I went to work.

Poupées occupied prime real estate, where Virginia Avenue crossed Highland. This neighborhood was a kind of Candy Land populated by renovated manors, adorable bungalows, cute cafes, and pricey boutiques. The ice cream parlors served generous scoops, hand-dipped by college-bound teenagers who spoke through colorful orthodontia. The only inconvenience was parking, and that was just trouble enough to make you appreciate the rest.

Southwest Atlanta was my home, no later accidents of geography could ever change that, but sometimes I could picture Andre and me living on the northeast side of town or even in Decatur. I didn’t want a fresh start, but maybe a little breathing room would be nice. We’d have to leave Old Hickey behind, but antique magnolias thrived in the Highlands, a different energy, but we’d adjust.

When I arrived at the store, my assistant was already there. As I booted up the computers, Tamar fitted little antlers and red noses on the poupées in the front window. I watched her steady concentration, her attention to detail, and I thought that maybe she was my better-case scenario. Prettier and ten years younger, she could play me in the movie of my life. Tamar created intricate miniature quilts for the poupées, and I told her to sign each one. They hardly sold because they were as expensive as the dolls, but I refused to let her lower the price. Know your worth, I told her. The mother of a son born the week before she finished her master’s degree at Emory, Tamar was slightly to the left of respectability, exactly where she liked to be.

This close to Christmas, the dolls remaining in the store were like the kids who didn’t get picked for kick ball. Some of them were flawed on purpose; I made the eyebrows too thick or gave the doll a long torso with short stubby legs. Somewhere out there was a girl or boy who needed to treasure something not quite perfect. These dolls, as crooked as real children, lined the shelves like eager orphans. Only one beautiful poupée remained, adorably symmetrical, chubby-cheeked and shiny-eyed. Tamar fitted him with wings and a halo and then suspended him from the ceiling using fishing line.

Once the display was situated, Tamar said, “Ready to rumble?”

I consulted my watch, a gift from Andre. Old-fashioned, I wound it every morning. As pretty as a baby, it was heavy and noisy, jerking slightly as the seconds ticked. I nodded and unlocked the glass door and we were open for business.

The store became busy, but sales were sluggish. Often someone held a doll and couldn’t quite figure out what was so disquieting and returned it to the shelf and looked away. But, as they say, I couldn’t complain. By the 25th, they would all be cozy under somebody’s tree.

After lunch, Tamar was antsy, fluffing and patting the dolls like pillows.

“What’s wrong?” I asked at last.

She used her hand to indicate her magnificent bosom. “I need to pump. Seriously. In five more minutes I’m going to pop a button.”

“Where’s the baby?”

“He’s with my mother. I tell you, the thrill of grandbabies will make even the most refined mother forgive you for getting knocked up.” She laughed, happy with the cards in her hand.

“Okay,” I said. “Go home and feed him. I’ll be okay here till close. But do me a favor and pick up some muslin and bring it by my place. We’ll have a holiday toast.”

I wasn’t even done talking and she was already struggling to button her coat.

“Do not buy the baby a pair of three-hundred-dollar sneakers,” I told her, handing over a holiday bonus. She laughed, all Christmas and light, and swore that she wouldn’t. “But I can’t promise not to buy him a leather jacket!”And then I watched my delighted could-have-been self walk out the door.

A few hours later, I was almost ready to close when a good-looking man dressed in a tan wool coat walked into the shop, announced by a jangle of bells. He was 100 percent Atlanta, his shirt still immaculate at the end of the business day. He seemed tired but upbeat.

“I need a gift for my daughter,” he said. “Her birthday is today. She’s seven; I need to get her something nice and I need it fast.”

He didn’t wear a ring, so I figured him to be a weekend dad. I walked him around the shop and his eyes bounced off all the remaining dolls, the cheerful ragamuffins.

“Are you from here?” he asked suddenly. “Are you a native?”

I pointed at my chest. “Southwest Atlanta: born, bred, and buttered.”

“Same here. Douglass High,” he said. “So these dolls, they look kind of ’flicted. Remember when we used to say that? I can’t put my finger on it, but all of them are kind of off. Are these the only ones you have?”

“They are all one of a kind,” I said, protective of my creations. “There are going to be variations …”

He gave a little laugh. “You can save that lie for the white people. But seriously …” Then he turned to the ceiling like he was searching for words and his eyes landed on the doll boy floating over our heads. “What about the one up there, dressed like an angel?” he said. “Is it for sale?”

Before I could answer, a movement across the street caught my eye. There, across busy Virginia Avenue, stood a Roy-ghost. I had learned to suppress the startle, but this one caught me unaware because he actually looked like Roy. Not Roy when he was young. Not Roy in the future. This looked like Roy would have looked if he had never left Eloe. The never-left Roy-ghost crossed his arms over his chest like a sentry. I kept my eyes on him as long as I could, knowing that if I turned away he would vanish.

“Do you have a ladder?” said the man. “If it’s for sale, I can pull it down.”

“It’s for sale,” I said.

Suddenly he sprang up like a basketball player and brought the angel to the ground. “I guess I still got it,” he said. “You wrap, right?”

The doll favored Roy, like a lot of them do. There are some as well that look like me, that look like Andre, that look like Gloria, and Daddy. As the tall man watched, I laid the doll in a box lined with soft tissue paper. I paused, but the impatient tapping of his keys on the counter spurred me to take a breath and fasten the lid in place. It came in stages, this panic that started at my center and fanned out to the rest of me. I had just cut a length of ribbon the color of clean river water, when I couldn’t stand it any longer. Using my fingernail to break the tape, I opened the box, snatching the angel boy from the paper and held his firm body to my chest.

“You okay?” the tall man said.

“I’m not,” I admitted.

He looked at this watch. “What the hell,” he said with a sigh. “I’m already late. What’s going on? My ex says I suck at emotions.” Mimicking her, he squeaked, “ ‘I can’t teach you how to feel feelings!’ So I want to warn you that I’m probably about to say the wrong thing, but my intentions are good.”

“My husband is getting out of prison.”

He cocked his head, “Is this good news or bad news?”

“It’s good,” I said too quickly. “It’s good.”

“You sound like you’re on the fence,” he said. “But I feel you. It’s always a positive development for one more brother to be free.” He then quoted his favorite rapper: “ ‘Open every cell in Attica, send ’em to Africa.’ You remember that?”

I nodded, holding on to the angel boy.

“Take somebody like me,” he said. “Aside from a couple of knucklehead cousins, I don’t know nothing about that incarceration life. But I know about being married. Divorced people, we are the ones who know. Forget the happy ones; they have no clue. How long has he been gone?”

“Five years,” I said.

“Shit. Okay. That’s a long time. I went to Singapore for six months. For work. I was trying to make a living. She acted like the mortgage was going to pay itself. When I got home, the marriage was shot. Only six months.” He shook his head. “I’m just saying, don’t get your hopes up. Incarceration aside, time is the quintessential mother.” Then he held his hands out. “Can I get the doll? It’s the only good one left.”

I ushered him out, wondering if he weren’t a ghost, too, the ghost of what could have happened but didn’t. He was my last customer for the evening. Foot traffic out front was brisk, but no one else entered the shop or even paused at the fanciful front window. I left a message for Tamar and then I closed the store early, cutting the lights as my watch jerked the minutes away.

I glanced across the street as I lowered the grate. No one was there besides the parking attendant, who pulled his hat down over his eyes.

When I was a kid, I collected keys. You’d be surprised at how many are lying around once you learn to notice them. I stored them in jelly jars on the top shelf of my closet. After a while, Olive and Big Roy started bringing me keys they found, too. Mostly, my collection consisted of tin suitcase keys and quick-cut keys that could be replaced for less than a dollar at the hardware store. Once, at a flea market, I bought a Ben Franklin key, long-shafted with two or three teeth at the bottom. But I didn’t discriminate, appreciating the idea of holding the means to open dozens of doors. I imagined myself to be in a movie or a comic book. In the fantasy, I would have to unlock a gate and I would try every key in my possession, finding the right one just in the nick of time. I probably kept this up from when I was eight until I was about twelve, when I realized that it was stupid. When I went to prison, I envisioned those keys every day.

When I rolled into Atlanta, I entered the city up I-75/85 to see the skyline before me like the Promised Land. I know it’s not like seeing the Empire State Building in New York or the Sears Tower in Chicago. As far as I know, Atlanta doesn’t have any famous buildings. You might even say that there are no skyscrapers. Sky reachers maybe, not sky scrapers. Regardless, the city is as enchanting as my mother’s face. I lifted my hands off the wheel, rolling under the I-20 bridge with my palms to the sky like a brave kid on a roller coaster. I wasn’t from this city, like Celestial, but I was of it, and it was thrilling to be home.

She told me that Poupées was in Virginia-Highland, exactly where I had suggested that she set up shop, back when we were only dreaming. It was the perfect location: in the city, where black folks could reach it easily, but in a zip code that made white people feel at home. I paid ten dollars to park my car in a lot across the street from her plate-glass window. She had done well for herself, I had to give her that. Her daddy’s money may have made it attainable, but she put in the work. The dolls in the window were of all shades—another one of my ideas. Benetton it up, I told her—and they looked to be having themselves a merry little Christmas. I stared at the display for fifteen minutes, maybe more, maybe less. It’s hard to mark time when your heart is a pinball in your chest.

I thought I saw her standing on a ladder, attaching a winged doll to the ceiling, but that girl was too young. She looked like Celestial did when I first met her, when she wouldn’t give me the time of day. I watched for a while longer while the look-alike folded the ladder and disappeared into the back. Then Celestial emerged from behind a hot pink curtain, like she was walking onto a stage.

She had cut her hair, not like a trim or a slightly different style. This new Celestial had almost no hair at all, rocking a Caesar, like mine. I stroked my own head, imagining the feel of hers. It didn’t make her look mannish; even from across the street I could see her big silver earrings and red lipstick, but she did seem more firm. I gazed, hoping to catch her eye, but she didn’t feel my stare. She walked around her store pointing at things and helping people choose gifts, smiling. I watched until I got cold, then I went back to my car, stretched out on the backseat, and slept like I was dead.

When I woke up, I saw her again, but her look-alike was gone. She was by herself until a tall brother walked in, looking like a cross between Vibe and GQ. I watched Celestial chat with him, but then she pitched her gaze in my direction, and her smile slid away like it was greasy. I don’t exactly believe in telepathy, but I know that I used to be able to talk to her without talking, so I asked her to come outside, to cross the street, to meet me on the sidewalk. I had her for a few seconds, but she pulled away. I waited, hoping that she would restore the connection, but she returned her attention to the task at hand, suddenly clutching the doll to her chest. The brother smiled, and even though I couldn’t see, I knew he flashed a mouthful of flawless teeth. Without my permission, my tongue went to the blank place in my lower jaw. But also without my permission, my hand visited the key ring in the front pocket of my pants.

The key ring was among the things I carried out of prison in a paper sack. The rubber-topped car key would fit the family-ready sedan. I didn’t know if Celestial kept it, but wherever it was, this key would turn over the ignition. The thick, toothless key used to open my office door, but you could bet dollars to donuts that a locksmith remedied that faster than you can say “guilty as charged.” The last key, a copy of a copy of a copy, matched the front door of the pleasant house on Lynn Valley Road. I wondered about that key more than I should have. Once or twice, I opened my mouth and stroked the jagged edge against my tongue.

On paper, it had never been my house. When Mr. D deeded this property over to Celestial, the only string attached was that Old Hickey couldn’t be cut down. It was like the way movie stars die and leave their fortune to a French poodle. The tree was mentioned by name, but “Roy Hamilton” was nowhere on the thick stack of documents that sealed the deal. This “home,” she promised, was a wedding gift to us both. “The key is in your pocket,” she said.

And the key was in my pocket now, but would it work?

Celestial didn’t file for divorce. After the first year of no visits, I asked Banks if she could end the marriage without informing me, and he said, “Technically, no.” I know she Dear Johned me, but that was two years ago, when I was facing a lot more time. But two years gave her ample opportunity to divorce a brother if that’s what she wanted to do. And plenty of time to hire a locksmith.

With the keys in my pocket tinkling like sleigh bells, I returned to the Chrysler, cranked the engine, and headed west. Pressing the accelerator, I kept my mind on one thing, the worn brass key, as light as a dime and labeled home.

I know this house as I know my own body. Before I opened the door, I felt the presence within the walls the way the tiniest cramp in your womb lets you know to get ready even though it has only been three weeks since the last time. As I stepped into the vestibule, the skin on my arms puckered and pilled, sending rapid sparks crisscrossing along the pathways of my blood.

“Hello?” I called, not knowing what to expect but sure I was not alone. “Who’s there?” I may see ghosts, but I don’t believe in haints. A ghost is a memory made solid, while a haint is a human spirit got free from the body but traveling this earth just the same. “Hello?” I said again, not sure what I believed in now.

“I’m in the dining room,” boomed a man’s voice that was definitely of this world, familiar and foreign at the same time.

There sat Roy at the head of the table with his fingers laced and fitted into the cave between his chin and chest. My arms were full of silly groceries for my planned evening with Tamar: lime sherbet, prosecco, chocolate blended with cayenne pepper, and Goldfish crackers for the baby.

“You didn’t change the locks on me.” Roy rose from his seat, his face glowing with wonder. “After all of everything, you made sure my key would still work.”

He took the bags from my arms as though it were the most natural thing in the world, leaving me standing there with nothing.

“Dre is on his way to get you,” I said, following Roy to the kitchen. “He left today.”

“I know,” he said, the bag of food between us like a truce. “It wasn’t Dre I wanted to talk to.”

I rubbed my arms to quiet the tingling as he set the bag down on the counter and then spun toward me and spread his arms, grinning, showing the dark space in the bottom of his smile. “You don’t have love for a brother? I went through a lot of trouble to get here. Don’t give me that Christian side hug. I want the real thing.”

I walked toward him on legs that didn’t feel like my own. He closed his arms around me, and I knew that this was my husband, not some sleight of mind. This was Roy Othaniel Hamilton. He was bigger now than when he lived in this house, his body harder and more muscular, but I recognized his energy, almost on the verge of action. Unaware of his own strength, he grabbed me so hard that I felt a little dizzy.

“I’m home, Celestial. I’m home.”

He released me and I filled myself up with greedy gulps of air.

Roy’s face was broader and more lined than when I last saw him, two years ago. I let my hand go to my own face, smooth with makeup, and then I remembered my head, almost clean shaven. I almost felt that I should apologize, remembering how he used to roll a single strand of my hair between his fingers. Sometimes he said out loud that Roy III should inherit his eyes but my hair.

He was prepared for this encounter; the starch scent of his new shirt mingled with the sweet fragrance of barbershop ointment. I was caught flat-footed, looking and feeling like the end of a long day.

“I didn’t plan on waylaying you like this,” he said.

There should be a word, I thought, for this experience when you’re surprised but at the same time the moment feels completely inevitable. Sometimes you read about these sixties’ radicals who accidentally killed a cop, or maybe they did it on purpose, I don’t know. But they run away, get a new name, and lead a clean, boring existence. They put on weight; they shop at Macy’s. But one day, they come home and there is the FBI. Their faces, flat on newsprint, always look astonished but not surprised.

“I missed you,” Roy said. “I have a lot of questions, but I need to say first that I miss you.”

I could recite Andre’s speech like lines from a play, these words he and I determined had to be said. And wasn’t Gloria right when she said that telling this particular truth was a woman’s work? But I stood in the shade of my husband returned home, and I couldn’t bring myself to speak a single necessary word.

He led me to the living room, like this was still his house. He looked around. “This room didn’t used to be turquoise did it? It was yellow, wasn’t it?”

“Goldenrod,” I said.

“All this African stuff is new. I like it, though.”

Along the walls were masks, and on nearly every flat surface was a carving, all keepsakes from my parents’ travels. He picked up a small ivory figurine depicting a woman ringing a bell. “This is real, isn’t it? Poor elephant.”

“It’s antique,” I said, a little defensive. “From before elephants were endangered.”

“Not that this would make a difference to the elephant in question,” he said. “But I get your point.”

We sat down on the leather sofa and looked at each other. We let the silence grow thick, waiting for the other to break the peace. Finally, he scooted so close that our hips touched. “Tell me, Celestial. Tell me whatever it is that you have to say.”

I shook my head no. He carried my unguarded fingers to his lips and kissed them twice, then he rubbed my hands over his fresh-shaven face. “Do you love me? Whatever else is details.”

I moved my lips as wordless as a goldfish.

“You do,” he said. “You didn’t divorce me. You didn’t change the locks. I had my doubts. You know I did. But when I was on the front porch, I decided to try my key. It slid in easy and turned slippery like WD-40. That’s how I knew, Celestial. That’s how I knew.

“I didn’t walk all over your house. I waited in here because I know you don’t use these rooms. Whatever it is, I want to hear it from you.”

When I didn’t say anything, he said it for me. “It’s Andre, isn’t it?”

“It isn’t yes or no,” I said.

Then he surprised me by laying his head in my lap, reaching for my arms and closing them around himself like a blanket.

She wasn’t like how I remembered her. It wasn’t just her man-short hair or the spread in her hips, though these are things I noticed. She was different now, sadder. Even her scent was altered. The lavender endured, but behind it was something earthy or woodsy. The lavender was from the oils she kept in a crystal bottle on the dresser. The wood-chip scent radiated from beneath her skin.

I recollected Davina, who welcomed me with accepting arms and a feast fit for a man home from the war. Celestial didn’t know I was coming, but I wanted her to sense I was on my way and prepare a table for me. I fell asleep in her lap, and she let me rest until I opened my eyes of my own accord. Night falls early in the winter. It was around eight o’clock, and outside it was as black as midnight.

“So,” she said. “How do you feel?” Then she looked embarrassed. “I know it’s a basic question, but I don’t know what I’m supposed to say.”

“You could say that you’re glad to see me. That you’re glad I’m out.”

“I am,” she said. “I’m so happy that you’re out. This is what we’ve all been praying for, why we kept Uncle Banks working on it.”

She sounded like she was pleading with me to believe her, so I held my hand up. “Please don’t.” Now I sounded like I was the one on my knees. “I don’t want for us to talk like this. Can we sit in the kitchen? Can we sit in the kitchen, talk to each other like a man and his wife?” Her face lost its softness as her eyes darted around the room, suspicious and maybe frightened. “I won’t touch you,” I said, though the words were as bitter as baking chocolate. “I promise.”

She moved toward the kitchen like she was marching toward a firing squad. “Did you eat?”

The kitchen was how I remembered. The walls were the color of the ocean, the round table a pedestal topped by dark glass. Four leather chairs were evenly spaced. I remembered when I assumed those seats would be occupied by our children. I remembered when this was my house. I remembered when she was my wife. I remembered when my whole life was ahead of me and this was a good thing.

“I don’t have anything to cook,” she said. “Not over here. I usually eat …” She trailed off.

“Next door?” I asked. “Let’s get this part over with. It’s Andre. Say yes, so we can go from there.”

I sat in the chair that I used to think of as my spot, and she perched on the countertop. “Roy,” she said like she was reading a script. “I am with Andre now. It’s true.”

“I know,” I said. “I know and I don’t care. I was away. You were vulnerable. Five years is a long time. If anybody knows how long five years is, it’s me.”

I went to the counter where she sat, positioning myself in the V of her legs. I reached for her face. She closed her eyes, but she didn’t pull away. “I don’t care what you did when I was gone. I only care about what our future is.” I leaned in, kissing her lightly.

“That’s not true,” she said as I felt the brush of her dry lips. “That’s not true. You do care. It matters. Everybody cares.”

“No,” I said. “I forgive you. I forgive you for everything.”

“It’s not true,” she said again.

“Please,” I said. “Let me forgive you.”

I angled toward her again, and again she didn’t move. I placed my hands on her defenseless head, and she didn’t stop me. I kissed her every way I could think of. I kissed her forehead like she was my daughter. I kissed her quivering eyelids like she was my dead mother. I kissed her hard on her cheeks like you do before you kill someone. I kissed her collarbone the way you do when you want more. I pulled her earlobe with my teeth the way you do when you know what someone likes. I did everything, and she sat as pliable as a doll. “If you let me,” I said, “I can forgive you.” Starting my circuit of kisses again, I made my way to her neck. She shifted her head slightly so I could touch my nose where her pulse beat close to the surface. But the thrill wore off fast, like the rush of a homemade drug, the way the cheap stuff hits you hard but leaves you hungry in an instant. I moved to the other side, hoping she would tilt her head the opposite way, allowing me access to all of her. “Just ask me,” I said, my voice barely more than a rumble in my chest. “Ask me and I will forgive you.” I held her now; she was limp, but she didn’t resist. “Ask me, Georgia,” I said. “Ask me so I can say yes.”

The bell rang seven times, one after the other, with no break in between. I jumped at the first note, and so did Celestial, righting herself quickly, like she had been caught. She slid off the counter, all but sprinting to the front door, throwing it wide for whomever she might find there. It was the girl from the shop, the one who looked like the past. She was holding a baby who enjoyed mashing the doorbell. He was a plump little fellow, bright-eyed and pleased.

“Tamar,” Celestial said. “You’re here.”

“Didn’t you tell me to come by with the muslin from the wholesale place?” The shop girl stepped into the foyer as the little boy reached for her hoop earrings, the left one dangling a key like Janet Jackson’s back in the day. “Jelani, you want to say hello to Auntie Celestial?” She shifted the baby in her arms. “I hope you don’t mind me bringing him.”

“No,” Celestial said in a rush. “You know I’m always tickled to see this little man.”

“He wants his uncle Dre,” Tamar said, struggling with the squirming baby. “You okay, girl? You look stressed, like this is a hostage situation.” She laughed a merry little laugh, until she noticed me standing there in the hallway. “Whoa,” she said. “Hi?”

Celestial paused before pulling me into the room by my arm. “Tamar, Roy. Roy, Tamar. And Jelani. Jelani is the baby.”

“Roy?” Tamar scrunched her pretty face. “Roy!” she said again once she ordered the details.

“Here I am,” I said, smiling my salesman’s smile. But then I noticed her eyebrow creep, reminding me that I was missing a tooth. I covered my face like I was coughing.

“Nice to meet you.” She extended her hand, tipped with blue-green fingernails, the same as the shimmer on her eyelids. Tamar was more like Celestial than Celestial herself. She was the woman I held in my mind when I slept on a dirty prison mattress.

“Sit down,” Celestial said. “Let me get you something.” Then she disappeared into the kitchen, leaving me alone with this girl and her baby boy.

On the floor, she spread a quilt of various shades of orange and set the baby on top of it. Jelani arranged himself on all fours, rocking. “He taught himself how to crawl.”

“Does he take after your husband?” I asked, trying to make conversation.

“Hypereducated single mother here,” she said, raising her hand. “But yes. Jelani is the spitting image of his daddy. When they are together, people make jokes about human cloning.”

She lowered herself onto the floor beside her son, then unwrapped a paper packet to reveal brown fabric the same color as her skin. She opened another, several shades darker, and then a third that was the peachy white that crayon companies used to call “flesh.”

“We are the world,” she said. “I believe this is enough to get us through to the new year. Inventory at the shop is pretty low. Celestial is going to have to be a lean, mean sewing machine if she wants to restock. I stay, trying to tell her to let me help, but she says that it’s not a poupée if she doesn’t sew it herself and write her John Hancock on the booty.”

I joined her on the floor, dangling my key ring to get the baby’s attention. He laughed, reaching for it. “Can I hold him?”

“Knock yourself out,” she said.

I pulled Jelani onto my lap. He struggled against me and then relaxed. Not having much experience with babies, I felt awkward and silly. The scene reminded me of a photo taped to Olive’s mirror—Big Roy carrying me when I was little like this. My father looked apprehensive as if he were cradling a ticking bomb. I bounced Jelani, wondering if this was the age I was when Big Roy made me his junior.

Celestial returned from the kitchen with two champagne flutes with tiny scoops of ice cream floating atop the bubbly. I took a sip and was reminded of Olive. On my birthday, she used to pull out her punch bowl to mix a ginger ale punch with gobs of orange sherbet bobbing on top. Greedy for the memory of it, I tipped the glass again. When Celestial returned with her own glass, mine was almost finished.

We sat there, the three of us, four if you counted the baby. Celestial and Tamar talked about fabric while I kept busy with Jelani. I tickled him under his chin until he gave his little baby laugh that sounded slightly hydraulic. It was amazing to think that here, in my arms, was an entire human being.

The son that Celestial and I didn’t have would have been four or five, I think. If a kindergartener slept in the back room, there is no way Celestial would be talking about how she’s with Andre now. I would say, “A boy needs his father.” This is a scientific fact. There wouldn’t be anything else to talk about.

But as things were, there was a lot to talk about, more words than could fit into my mouth.

Eventually, Tamar gathered up her little boy, zipping him into a puffy coat that looked like something an astronaut might wear. Roy and I were both sorry to see her go. It was as though we were her parents, and she our busy, successful daughter who could spare only a few minutes for a visit, but we were grateful for every single second. We stood in the doorway, waving as she looked over her shoulder to ease out of the driveway. As she pulled away, her headlights became two more glowing lights on this block bedazzled for the holidays. My own house was dark; I didn’t even bother to hang the spruce wreath I’d bought a month ago. Old Hickey was festive, though. A string of lights candy-caned up the thick trunk. This was Andre’s work, his effort to assure himself that everything would be all right.

Even after Tamar was long gone, I stared down the quiet street and worried about Andre. He was in Louisiana now, trying to do the noble thing. I’d rung him from the store while he was on the road, making his way south. We’re worth it, I told him. How had so much changed in the span of a couple of hours? Absently, I reached in my pocket for my phone, but Roy swept my hand to the side. “Don’t call him yet. Give me a chance to speak my piece first.”

But he didn’t say anything. Instead, he guided my hands across the break in the bridge of his nose, along the scar at his hairline, small but punctuated twice on each side by pinpoint-raised scars. His face, the totality of it, rested in my palms, solid and familiar. “You remember me?” he asked. “You recognize me?”

I nodded, letting my arms hang at my side as he explored my features. He closed his eyes as though he couldn’t trust them. When his thumb passed my lips, I caught it in a light pucker. Roy responded with a relieved sigh. He led me through the house without turning on the lights, like he wanted to see if he could find his way by touch. A woman doesn’t always have a choice, not in a meaningful way. Sometimes there is a debt that must be paid, a comfort that she is obliged to provide, a safe passage that must be secured. Every one of us has lain down for a reason that was not love. Could I deny Roy, my husband, when he returned home from a battle older than his father and his father’s father? The answer is that I could not. Behind Roy in the narrow hallway, I understood that Andre had known this from the start. This is why he raced down the highway, to keep me from doing this thing that we all feared I would have to do.

How, then, should I classify what transpired between my husband and me the night he returned to me from prison? We were there in the kitchen, me with my back against the granite counter, melted sorbet soaking my clothes.

Roy snaked his hands under my blouse. “You love me. You know you do.”

I wouldn’t have answered even if he hadn’t cut off my breath with a kiss that tasted like desire streaked through with anger. Yes means yes and no means no, but what is the meaning of silence? Roy’s body was stronger now than it was five years ago when he last slept in this house. He was a commanding stranger breathing hot on my neck.

When he moved us in the direction of the master bedroom, the corner room that had originally belonged to my parents and was the space where Roy and I slept as husband and wife, I said, “Not in there.” He ignored me, leading me as though we were dancing. Some things were as unavoidable as the tide.

He removed my clothes as easily as you might peel an orange, then he leaned over to switch on a bright lamp. I was ashamed of my body, five years older than when he last saw me this way. Time can be hard on a woman. I drew knees up to my chest.

“Don’t be shy, Georgia,” Roy said. “You’re perfect.” He gripped my shin, gently tugging my legs straight. Don’t hide from me. Uncross your arms, let me see you.”

In the private library of my spirit, there is a dictionary of words that aren’t. On those pages is a mysterious character that conveys what it is to have no volition even when you do. On the same page it is explained how once or twice in your life you will find yourself bared, underneath the weight of a man, but a most ordinary word will save you.

“Do you have protection?” I asked him.

“What?” he said.

“Protection.”

“Don’t say that, Georgia,” he said. “Please don’t say that.”

He rolled away from me and we lay parallel. I shifted, looking out the window at Old Hickey, ancestral and silent. Even when Roy planted his weighty hand on my hip I didn’t turn. “Be my wife,” he said.

I didn’t answer, so he flipped me over like a log and pushed his face into the hollow of my throat, wedging his hands between my thighs. “Come on, Celestial,” he said. “It’s been so many years.”

“We need protection,” I said, filling my mouth with the word, feeling its weight on my tongue.

He guided my hand below his rib where the skin was knotted and rubbery. “I got stabbed,” he said. “I never did anything to this dude. Never even looked at him, and he sharpens a goddamn toothbrush and tries to kill me with it.”

I let my thumb travel over the scar.

“You see what I’ve been through?” he said. “You didn’t know what was happening to me. I know that if you knew, you wouldn’t have done me like that.”

He kissed my shoulder and up toward my neck. “Please.”

“We have to use protection,” I said.

“Why?” Roy said. “Because I was in prison? I was innocent. You know I was innocent. When that lady got raped, I was with you. So you know I didn’t do it. Don’t treat me like a criminal, Celestial. You’re the only one that knows for sure. Please don’t treat me like I got some kind of disease.”

“I can’t,” I said.

“Well, can you at least listen?” He lifted stories from his box of memories, each one making the case for why he shouldn’t be forced to put a barrier between us.

“I accidentally killed a man,” he told me. “I’ve been through a lot, Celestial. Even if you go in innocent, you don’t come out that way. So, please?”

“Don’t beg me,” I said. “Please don’t do that.”

He moved closer, pinning me to the bed.

“No,” I said. “Don’t do this.”

“Please,” he said.

Picture us there in our marriage bed. Me, fixed to the mattress, completely at his grace. But is there any other way, even when love is true and pure, not dirty with time and betrayal? Maybe that’s what it means to be in love, to willingly be at the mercy of another person. I closed my eyes feeling his weight above me, and I prayed like I was supposed to when I was a little girl. If I should die before I wake. “Protection,” I whispered, knowing there was no such thing.

“I’m in pain, Celestial. Can’t you tell?”

And so I lay myself back again, seeing how he had suffered these years, seeing how he suffered then, with his head against the pillow. “I know,” I said to Roy. “I know.”

He turned to me. “Is it because you think I got something, that I did something while I was in there? Or is it because you don’t want to get pregnant again? Because you don’t want to have a baby for me?”

There was no acceptable answer to this question. No man welcomes this way of doing it but not doing it. Coming close but only so close.

“Tell me,” he said. “Which one?”

I flattened my lips, sealing the truths into myself. I shook my head.

He turned, pressing my chest with his own. “You know,” he said, with a trace of menace. “I could take it if I wanted to.”

I didn’t struggle. I didn’t plead. I braced myself for what seemed fated from the moment I entered my own home and felt that it was no longer mine.

“I could,” he said again, yet he raised himself from the bed, wrapping the sheet around himself like a winding cloth, leaving me cold and exposed. “I could, but I won’t.”

Davina didn’t do me that way. When I came calling, she opened her home. She opened herself. Celestial, my lawfully wedded, is playing me like Fort Knox. Walter tried to warn me. I was prepared to stomach that there had been another man, maybe even other men. A woman’s only human. I’m not naïve. Nobody survives prison being cute. But when a woman doesn’t divorce you, puts money on your books, and doesn’t change the locks on you—under these circumstances a man might think that he has a chance. And when you lean in to kiss her, she lets you, when you lead her by the hand to a bedroom, you know that you weren’t imagining the whole thing. I’ve been away five years, but not so long that I don’t remember how the world works.

Do you have protection?

She knew I didn’t. I came to her ready but not prepared. She is my wife. How would she feel if I broke out with a rubber? She wouldn’t take it that I was being considerate; she would take it that I thought she had been sleeping around. Why couldn’t it be like it was in New York, when we were almost strangers? How many times, when I was away, did I recall that first night? I flicked through all the details, a silent movie in my mind, and I guarantee there was no latex on the set. That night in Brooklyn, I felt like Captain America; I didn’t even care that I lost my tooth defending her honor. You don’t get that many opportunities to be a hero like that. Now she wants to act like it never happened.

I threw the bedsheet to the floor and straggled the house in the buff, searching for somewhere to lay my nappy head. The master bedroom was out of the question for obvious reasons, so I settled myself in the sewing room and flopped on the futon, although it was a little short for a man my size. The room was cluttered with poupées in various stages of creation. Beside the sewing machine was a cloth head, box brown, and a few pairs of arms topped with waving hands. I won’t lie and say it wasn’t disturbing. But I was already disturbed when I stormed in there.

The finished dolls sat up on a shelf, looking patient and friendly. I thought of Celestial’s assistant—was her name Tamara? I thought of her big, healthy boy. When Celestial left the room to get their coats, the girl touched my arm with her blue-green fingernails. “You are going to have to let her go,” she said. “Break your own heart, or they will break it for you.” My anger rose up the way smoke does, thick and suffocating. There was only one thing to say, but it wasn’t fit for polite company. “I’m telling you,” she said. “Because I know what you don’t. It’s not going to be on purpose, but you’re going to get hurt.” I was trying to figure out what kind of game this little girl was playing when Celestial returned with the coats and kissed the baby like he was her own.

It was maybe three o’clock in the morning; these were drunk thoughts, even though I wasn’t drinking. I reached up on the shelf, pulled down one of the dolls and punched it in the face. The soft head dented before it sprang back, still smiling. I stretched out on the futon, with my feet hanging over the edge, but I couldn’t get comfortable. I got up, crept down the hallway and stood outside the room where Celestial was sleeping, but I couldn’t bring myself to try the knob. If she locked the door against me, I didn’t want to know.

Back in the workroom, I picked up the phone and dialed Davina, who answered sounding frightened, as anyone would be at this hour.

“Hey, Davina, it’s Roy,” I said.

“And?”

“I wanted to say hello,” I told her.

“Well, you just did,” she said back. “Satisfied?”

“Don’t hang up. Please stay on the line. Let me say how much I appreciate you spending time with me. For being so nice.”

“Roy,” she said with a little melt in her voice. “You safe? You don’t sound solid. Where are you?”

“Atlanta.” After that, I didn’t have much in the way of words. There’s not many women who will hold the phone and listen to a grown man cry over another woman, but Davina Hardrick waited until I was able to say, “Davina?”

“I’m here.”

She didn’t say, I forgive you. But I was grateful for those two words just the same.

“I don’t know what to do,” I said.

“Go on to sleep. Like they say, weeping endures for a night.”

“But joy comes in the morning,” I finished. This is the promise spoken at every Baptist funeral. I thought of my mama, and I asked Davina if she had been there for her home-going.

“Did you see Celestial and Andre? Were they together then?”

Davina said, “Why do you care so much?”

“Because I do.”

“I’ll tell you this. I saw them afterward when I was picking up some hours at the Saturday Nighter for my uncle Earl. They came in and started getting drunk in the middle of the day, her especially. I don’t think they were together, but it was coming. You could taste it on the breeze, like rain on the way. When he went to the bathroom, she leaned across the bar and said to me, ‘I am a terrible person.’ ”

“She said that? My wife?”

“Yeah. That was her exact words. Then old boy came back and she got herself together. Five minutes later, they were gone.”

“Anything else?”

“That’s all. Later on, your daddy came in. Black dirt on his clothes from head to toe. People say he buried your mother with his own two hands.”

I held the receiver hard, pressing it against my ear, like that would make me less alone. I wasn’t even a week out of prison and already I felt caged again, like a woman had used a length of clothesline to bind me to a chair. You hear these stories about men who shoplift a beer right in front of the security cameras so they can get sent back to the joint, to get back to where they know what to expect. I wouldn’t do something like that, but I’m not mystified by the choice. Pulling a soft lap blanket over my hips, I thought about Walter, my father the Ghetto Yoda, and I wondered what he would say about all of this.

Davina said, “You there?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Get some rest. It’s hard at first, for everybody. Take care of yourself,” she said with a calming voice like a lullaby.

“Davina, I was thinking to tell you something. I’ve been thinking back.”

“Yeah?”

“I remember a boy named Hopper.”

“Was he okay?” Her voice was so low that I couldn’t say for sure that I actually heard it, yet I knew what she said.

“He was doing okay. That’s why I didn’t remember him, because there wasn’t much to remember.”

When I hung up, the large orange clock over the sewing machine announced that it was three thirty, a perfect right-angle o’clock. I figured Andre was at my father’s house, likely sleeping in my bed. In the dark, I smiled a little bit, picturing Andre’s expression when Big Roy told him I was gone to Atlanta. He was probably dressed in jeans and a T-shirt like an average person, but in my mind’s eye he was always wearing that skinny gray suit he wore for my mother’s services. Oh Mama, I thought. What would she think if she could see me now, sleeping on the couch in my own house, surrounded by happy baby dolls that Celestial was going to sell for $150 a pop?

“Only in Atlanta.” I said it out loud before I finally figured out how to sleep.

Roy’s father and I slept in the living room, with me on the couch and him in his recliner chair, like he didn’t trust me not to make a break for the door. He didn’t need to worry. By the time I covered myself with the crisp sheet and soft blanket, I was tired and ready to close the book on this insane day. The room was quiet except for the hiss of the gas heater in the corner, glowing blue and running hot. Still, we woke up several times in the night and shared a few words.

“You want kids?” he asked me, just as I had fallen asleep.

“Yeah, I do,” I said, hoping to return to my dream.

“Roy, too. He needs that new beginning.”

Feeling claustrophobic under the covers, I wondered if Big Roy knew how close he had come to being a grandfather. I recalled driving home with Celestial, miserable and exhausted. “I don’t know about Celestial, though. She might not want them.”

Big Roy said, “She just thinks that she doesn’t. Babies bring the love with them when they come.”

“You and Ms. Olive decided to stop after Roy?”

“I would have kept going,” Big Roy said, through a yawn. “Fill up the house. But Olive didn’t trust me enough. She was scared I would get my own offspring and forget about Little Roy, but I wouldn’t do that. He was my junior. Still, she went to the doctor and got that taken care of before I even had a chance to bring it up.”

Then he was asleep again or at least not talking. I lay there counting the hours until morning, fingering my father’s chain, doing my best not to think about Roy making his way home.

It was dark out when Big Roy rose from his recliner and pointed me in the direction of the bathroom, where he set out fresh towels and a toothbrush. Before I headed for the road, we ate breakfast: coffee and dinner rolls slick with butter. The weather was cool but not cold. We sat on the front porch, our legs dangling.

“You want her,” Big Roy said, fiddling with the strings on his hooded sweatshirt. “But you don’t need her. You see what I’m saying? Little Roy needs his woman. She is the only thing he has left of the life he had before. The life he worked for.”

The coffee, laced with chicory, gave off a sweet tobacco-smoke aroma. Although I usually take mine black, Big Roy lightened it with milk and sweetened it with sugar. I drank it down, then set the cup on the concrete floor beside me. I stood up and extended my hand. “Sir,” I said.

He shook my hand in a manner that felt both formal and sincere.

“Stand down, Andre. You’re a good man. I know you are. I remember how you carried Olive. Do the decent thing and stay away for a year or so. If she wants you after a year, and you still want her, I won’t object.”

“Mr. Hamilton, I do need her.”

He shook his head. “You don’t even know yet what need is.”

He waved like he was dismissing me, and without thinking, I moved in the direction of my car, but then I turned back. “This is bullshit, sir.”

Big Roy regarded me with a confusion, as though a stray cat suddenly started quoting Muhammad Ali.

“I’ll admit that I have had it better than some, but there are a whole lot who have it better than me, and there are some out there who have it worse than Roy. Be honest. You have to see my point, too. I saw you out there that afternoon in the hot sun struggling with that shovel. You know exactly what it is that I feel.”

“Olive and I were married more than thirty years; we went through a lot.”

“It doesn’t give you the right to talk to me like this, to act like you’re God up on a throne. Do I have to go to jail to have a right to try to be happy?”

Big Roy scratched his neck where the hair was growing in tight gray curls, then swiped at the standing water in his eyes. “You have to understand, Andre. The boy is my son.”

Morning came gently. I slept deep and hard until the sound of frying bacon woke me up. I always started the day achy. Five years lying on a prison bunk will ruin your body. In the light of day, I still found the dolls to be unsettling but less mocking than they had been at night.

“Good morning,” I called out in the direction of the kitchen.

After a beat, she said, “Good morning. You hungry?”

“After I have a bath I will be.”

“I put some towels in the yellow bathroom,” she said.

Looking down, I remembered that I was as naked as a newborn. “Anybody here?”

“Just us,” she said.

Treading down the hall, I was aware of my body: the puckered scar below my ribs, my prison muscles, and my penis, morning strong but still disappointed. Celestial was busy in her kitchen, rattling pots and pans, but I felt something like surveillance as I made my way. Safe in the washroom, I saw that she had set my duffel bag on the counter so I would have clothes to wear. Hope woke up with a growl like a hungry stomach.

Waiting for the water to heat up, I checked under the sink and discovered some kind of manly shower gel that I figured must belong to Dre. It smelled green, like the woods. I kept rooting around in the cabinet, looking to see what else belonged to him, but I found nothing, no razor, no toothbrush, no foot powder. So hope gave another little growl, like a rottweiler puppy this time. Andre didn’t live here either. He had his own separate house, even if it was right next door.

Under the hot shower, I preferred not to use Dre’s soap, but the only other option smelled like flowers and peaches. I cleaned my whole body, taking my time, sitting on the side of the tub, scrubbing the bottoms of my feet and between my toes. I squeezed some more soap and used it on my hair, rinsing myself in water so hot it hurt. Then I dressed myself in my own clothes bought with my own money.

When I got to the kitchen, she had positioned the plates and glasses in front of the chairs that we never used to use.

“Good morning,” I said again, watching her pour batter onto the waffle iron.

“Sleep well?” Celestial’s face was bare, but she wore a dress made out of sweater material that made her look like she was going out.

“Actually, I did.” Then the hopeful rottweiler puppy started his thing again. “Thank you for asking.”

She served waffles, bacon fried crisp, and a fruit cup. She made my coffee black with three spoons of sugar. When we were still normal, we sometimes ate brunch at trendy restaurants, especially in the summer. Celestial wore tight sundresses and flowers braided into her hair. With my eyes on my wife, I would tell the waitress that I liked my coffee like I liked my women, “black and sweet.” This always got me a smile. Then Celestial would say, “I like my mimosa like I like my men: transparent.”

Before we ate, I opened my hand. “I think we should say grace.”

“Okay.”

With bowed head and closed eyes, I spoke. “Father God, we ask you today to bless this meal. Bless the hands that prepared it, and we ask you to bless this marriage. In the name of your son we pray. Amen.”

Celestial didn’t say “Amen” back. Instead, she said, “Bon appétit.”

We ate, but I couldn’t taste anything. It reminded me of the morning before my sentencing hearing. The county jail served a breakfast of powdered eggs, cold bologna, and soft toast. For the first time since I had been denied bail I cleaned my plate, because this was the only time that I couldn’t actually taste it.

“Well?” I said, finally.

“I have to go to work,” she said. “It’s Christmas Eve.”

“Let your twin mind the store.”

“Tamar already agreed to open for me, but I can’t leave her by herself the whole day.”

“Celestial,” I said, “me and you need to talk before—”

“Before?”

“Before Andre gets here. I know he’s on his way.”

“Roy,” Celestial said. “I hate the way this is happening.”

“Listen,” I said, hoping to sound reasonable. “All I want is a conversation. I’m not saying that we need to take it to the threshing floor. I want things to be cool between us. If we play our cards right, tell each other the truth, I can be gone before Andre even gets …” I hesitated. I didn’t want to say home. “I’ll be gone before he even gets back.”

Celestial stacked my scraped-clean plate on top of hers, which was half full of breakfast. “What is there to say,” she said, sounding fatigued. “You know everything that there is to know.”

“No,” I said. “I know what you’ve been doing, but I don’t know what you want moving forward.”

She nibbled her lip like she was thinking, walking through every scenario in her head. When she was finally ready to speak, I wasn’t ready to hear it. “Let me get my stuff first,” I said. “Just let me collect my things.”

Startled, she said, “The clothes went to charity, one that helps men dress for interviews. Everything else I boxed up. I didn’t throw out anything personal.” Celestial looked deflated. I missed her defiant cloud of hair. I wanted her back to the way she was when I met her, pretty and a little outrageous. I smiled at her to tell her that I could still see the young lady that she used to be, but then I remembered my jack-o’-lantern grin.

My missing tooth was part of my body that should have been with me forever. Teeth are bones at the end of the day. And everyone has a right to their own bones.

“Is there anything in particular you need? I made a little inventory sheet on the computer.”

All I wanted to take with me was my tooth. For years, I stored it in a velvet box, like what a ring comes in. I couldn’t tell her because she would think that I was being sentimental, that I was turning the memory of our first date over in my mouth like a mint. She wouldn’t understand that I couldn’t leave without the rest of my body.

She had made her choice. I could see it in the determined square of her shoulder as she washed my plate and cup. She had chosen what it was going to be and that was that. Just like a jury in a prefab courtroom had decided that I was a rapist and that was that. Just like a judge in another shabby courtroom decided I was going to prison and that was that. Then a compassionate judge in DC agreed that the prosecutor set me up, so I got free and that, too, was that. For the last five years, people have been telling me what my life is going to be. But what could I do about it? Tell the judge that I’m not going to jail? Tell the DA that I decided to stay? What could I tell Celestial? Could I demand that she love me again? Last night when we were in bed, when she was chanting “protection, protection,” for a moment, less than a moment, a micro-moment, a nano-moment, I thought about showing her that it wasn’t up to her. Five years ago, I swore to a jury that I never violated any woman. Even in college, I never wrestled with a date until things went my way. My boys, some of them, talked about how when you find out a girl has done you wrong, you get her in bed one more time for one last angry fucking. I was never into beating somebody up with my dick, but I considered it last night for a flash of an instant. I think that’s what prison did to me. It made me a person who would even entertain such a thought.

The way to the garage is downstairs and then through the laundry room, where a stainless-steel washer and dryer hummed, modern and efficient. I entered the garage and flipped a switch, raising the large paneled door. The metal-on-metal noise made me swallow hard. When we first were married, Celestial said that the screech of the garage door made her smile because it meant that I was home from work. In those days, we had been right in there, together on all the levels—mental, spiritual, and yes, physical. But now, it’s like she doesn’t even know me. Or even worse, it’s like she never knew me. What about this, Walter? Nobody prepared me for this.

The light of the day brightened the space a little bit. It was Christmas Eve, regardless of what was happening to me. Across the street, a stylish woman moved a dozen poinsettias onto the porch. Kitty-corner, lightbulb candelabras winked on and off. In the bright of day, I could barely make out the bulbs, but when I squinted, there they were. Directly in my view was that tree that Celestial tended like a pet. It’s not like I couldn’t appreciate vegetation. When I was a boy, I was partial to a pecan tree, but for a reason. It dropped premium nuts that sold for a dollar a sack. Olive cared for a stand of crape myrtles in her backyard because she delighted in butterflies and blossoms. It was different.

Turning my attention back to the great indoors, I saw that the garage was well maintained, and I figured this was Dre’s doing. He was always organized. The garage had a showroom vibe to it, too clean for anything to actually have been used. When I lived here, you could smell the dirt on the shovel, the gas in the mower, and the broken-twig scent on the clippers. Now each tool was hung on a peg, polished like she was trying to sell it. Everything was labeled, like you needed a little tag to tell you what an axe was.

Along the south-facing wall was a cluster of cardboard boxes. Clear block letters: roy h., misc. I would have preferred to see only my name, roy. Or roy’s stuff. Even roy’s shit would have been a little more personal. When I left the prison, they gave me a paper sack labeled hamilton, roy o. personal effects. In that bag was everything I had on me when I went in, minus a heavy pocketknife that belonged to Big Roy’s uncle and namesake, the first Roy. Now I was looking at six or seven not-big boxes. All of them could easily fit in the Chrysler. Smarter men, like Big Roy or Walter, would load it all up and hit the highway. But no, not me. I hauled the stack of boxes out and sat them on the half-circular bench at the base of Old Hickey.

I expected to come home to psychological chaos. But when I pulled my truck to the end of Lynn Valley Road, what I encountered was more physical than emotional. The yard was strewn with cardboard and other garbage; Celestial was standing in the driveway dressed for work, sobbing into her fists, while Roy Hamilton was hacking away at Old Hickey with my double-sided axe. I hoped that I was hallucinating. After all, I had been driving for a long time. But the piercing thwack of metal against green wood convinced me that the scene was real.

Celestial and Roy both spoke my name at the same time, striking a peculiar chord. I was torn, not sure which of them to respond to, so I asked a question that either of them could answer: “What the hell is going on?”

Celestial pointed at Old Hickey as Roy gave another gutsy swing, leaving the axe buried in the tree, like a sword stuck in a stone.

In the driveway, I stood midway between them, two separate planets, each with its own gravitational pull and orbit. The sun glinted overhead, giving light, but not heat.

“Look who’s here,” Roy said. “The third most terrible person in the world.” He picked up the tail of his shirt to mop his perspiring forehead. “The man of the hour.” He smiled broadly, looking snaggle-toothed and unscrewed. The axe jutted from the tree, immobilized.

I don’t know that I would have recognized Roy if I had run into him on the street. Yes, he was the same Roy, but prison made him bulky, deep grooves creased his forehead, and his shoulders caved a little toward his overdeveloped chest. Although we were roughly the same age, he seemed much older but not in that elder-statesman way like Big Roy; he was more like a powerful machine that was wearing out.

“What’s up, Roy?”

“Well …” He looked up at the sun, not bothering to shield his eyes. “I got locked up for a crime I didn’t commit, and when I get home, my wife has hooked up with my boy.”

Celestial walked toward me like this was any other day and I had just returned from work. By habit, I curled my arm around her waist and kissed her cheek. The touch of her was reassuring. No matter what had happened in my absence, I was the one holding her now.

“You okay, Celestial?”

“Yes, she’s okay,” Roy said. “You know I wouldn’t hurt her. I’m still Roy. She may not be my wife, but I’m still her husband. Can’t y’all see that?” He held his hands up as if to show he was unarmed. “Come talk to me, Dre. Let’s sit down like men.”

“Roy,” I said. “Everybody can see we got a conflict here. What can we do to squash it?” After I released Celestial, my arms felt useless. “It’s all right,” I said to her, but I was really trying to convince myself. Joining Roy in the “don’t shoot” salute, I advanced toward Old Hickey. The odor of the exposed wood was oddly sweet, almost like sugarcane. Displaced chunks of wood littered the grass like misshapen confetti.

“Let’s talk,” Roy said. “I’m sorry about what I did to your tree. I got carried away. A man has feelings, you know. I have a lot of feelings.” He swept the wood chips from the seat.

“My father built this bench,” I said. “When I was little.”

“Dre,” he said. “Is that all you got?” He popped up, snatching me into a back-clapping man-hug, and I was embarrassed at how I balked at his touch.

“So,” he said, releasing me and plopping down on the bench. “What you know good?”

“This and that,” I said.

“So are we going to talk about this?”

“We can,” I said.

Roy patted the space next to him and then leaned back on the tree, stretching his legs in front of him. “Did my old man tell you how we set you up?”

“He mentioned it,” I said.

“So what was it? I need to know that, and I promise I’ll get out of your way. What was it that made you say, ‘Fuck ole Roy. I’m sorry he’s sitting in prison, but I think I’ll help myself to his woman’?”

“You’re misrepresenting,” I said. “You know that’s not how it went down.” Because it felt dirty leaving Celestial in the driveway, out of earshot, I beckoned to her.

“Don’t call her over here,” Roy said. “This is between me and you.”

“It’s between all of us,” I said.

Across the street our neighbor straightened several poinsettias, placing them into a row. Roy waved at her and she waved back. “Maybe we should invite the whole neighborhood and let it be between everybody.”

Celestial sat on the bench between us, clean like rain. I circled my arm around her shoulder.

“Don’t touch her,” Roy said. “You don’t have to pee on her like a dog marking your territory. Have some manners.”

“I’m not territory,” Celestial said.

Roy got up and began an agitated pacing. “I’m trying to be gracious. I swear to God, I am. I was innocent,” he said. “Innocent. I was minding my business and next thing I know I got snatched up. It could happen to you, too, Dre. It takes nothing for some he-say she-say to go left. You think the police are going to care that you got your own house or that you got that Mercedes SUV? What happened to me could happen to anybody.”

“You think I don’t know that?” I said. “I been black all my life.”

Celestial said, “Roy, not one day went by when we didn’t talk about you, didn’t think about you. You think we don’t care, but we do. We thought you were gone for good.”

I was silent as Celestial explained. Her words were those we agreed upon, but now they rang less than true. Were we saying that our relationship was an accident of circumstance? Were we saying, too, we loved each other only because Roy had been unavailable? That was a lie. We loved each other because we always had, and I refused to ever claim anything different.

“Celestial,” Roy said. “Stop talking.”

“Look,” I said. “Roy, you have to see that we’re together. Full stop. Details are not important. Full stop.”

“Full stop?” he said.

“Full stop,” I repeated.

“Listen,” Celestial pleaded. “Both of you.”

“Go in the house,” Roy said. “Let me talk to Dre.”

I pressed my hand to the small of her back to urge her toward the door, but she was adamant. “I’m not going,” she said. “This is my life, too.”

We both turned to her. The admiration I feel for her flashed on Roy’s craggy face. “Listen if you want to,” he said. “I told you to go in the house for your own benefit. You don’t need to hear what me and Andre need to talk about. I’m trying to be a gentleman.”

“It’s her choice,” I said. “We don’t keep secrets.”

“Oh yes you do,” Roy sneered. “Ask her about last night.”

I asked her with my eyes, but her expression was blank, shuttered down against the sun.

“I’m telling you that you don’t want to be out here,” Roy said to Celestial. “When men talk, it’s not a pretty kind of conversation. That’s really the main thing about being in prison. Too many men in one place. You’re stuck in there knowing that there is a world full of women who are putting out flowers, making things nice, civilizing the whole planet. But there I was stuck in a cage like an animal with a bunch of other animals. So I’m going to give you one more chance, Celestial. Take your pretty little self in the house. Go sew some baby dolls or something.”

“I’m not going,” she said. “Somebody has to be out here who has some sense.”

“Go on in the house, baby,” I said. “You had your chance to talk to him all day yesterday.” I tried to make the word talk sound neutral, not like I was wondering what they did beyond conversation.

“Ten minutes is enough,” Roy said. “This won’t take long.”

Celestial stood up. I watched her back, smooth and muscular, as she walked away. Roy looked across at the neighbor who was watching openly now, not even bothering to fiddle with her flowers.

After Celestial finally disappeared, he said, “Like I said. The world is full of women, Atlanta especially. You’re black, employed, heterosexual, unincarcerated, and into sisters. This shit is your fucking oyster. But you had to go for my wife. That was disrespectful to me as a person. It was disrespectful to what I was going through, what all of us are going through in this country. Celestial was my woman. You knew it. Hell, you’re the one that introduced us.” Now he was standing before me, his voice not so much raised but going deeper. “What, was it just convenient? You wanted some pussy next door so you wouldn’t have to bother getting in your car?”

Now I got to my feet, because there are some words that a man can’t take sitting down. When I stood up, he was waiting on me and thrust his chest against mine. “Get out of my face, Roy.”

“Tell me,” he said. “Tell me why you did it.”

“Why I did what?”

“Why you stole my wife. You should have left her alone. She was lonely. Fine, but you weren’t. Even if she was throwing it at you, you could have walked away.”

“What about this is so hard for you to comprehend?”

“That’s bullshit,” Roy said. “You knew she was my wife before you got caught up with this love stuff. You saw your opportunity and you took it. Long as you got your dick wet, you didn’t care.”

I pushed him because there was no other option. “Don’t talk about her like that.”

“Or what? You don’t like my language? We are not all that PC in prison; we say what’s on our mind.”

“So what do you mean? What do you want me to say? If I tell you she was a piece of ass, you would want to fight. If I tell you I want to marry her, it won’t be any better. Why don’t you just hit me and cut the chitchat? The bottom line is that she doesn’t belong to you. She never belonged to you. She was your wife, yeah. But she didn’t belong to you. If you can’t understand that, kick my ass and get it over with.”

Roy paused for a minute. “That’s what you have to say? That she doesn’t belong to me?” He let out of stream of spit through the space where his tooth used to be. “She doesn’t belong to you either, my friend.”

“Fair enough.” I walked away, hating the questions twining up my legs like a barbed vine. It was doubt that did it, that left me exposed, not watching my own back. Roy’s laugh shook me up, made me forget that I trusted her like I trusted my own eyes.

He struck me from behind before I had even taken a step. “Don’t walk away from me.”

This is the violence my father promised me. Take it, he had said. Take it and get on with your life. I offered my face and Roy hit me squarely in my nose before I could even ball my fists. I felt the impact first, then the hot gush over my lip, followed by the pain. I got in a couple of strong blows, a low hook to the kidneys and drove my head into his chest before he wrestled me to the ground. Roy spent the last five years in prison while I’d been writing computer code. Up until this very instant, I was proud of my clean record, my not-thug life. But on the grass beneath Old Hickey, shielding myself from Roy’s granite fists, I wished I were a different type of man.

“Everybody is so calm, like this is only a little speed bump.” He panted. “This is my life, motherfucker. My life. I was married to her.”

Have you ever stared fury in its eyes? There is no saving yourself from a man in its throes. Roy’s face was haunted and wild. The cords of his neck muscles were like cables; his lips made a hard gash. The unceasing blows were fueled by a need to hurt me that was greater than his own need for oxygen or even freedom. His need to hurt me was greater even than my own desire to survive. My efforts to protect myself were ritualistic, mannered, and symbolic, while his fists, feet, and needs were operating from a brutal code.

Had he learned this in prison, this way of beating a person? There was none of the stick-and-move than I remembered from school-yard brawls. This was the nasty scrapping of a man with nothing to lose. If I remained on the grass, he would stomp my head. I raised myself, but my legs failed me. I fell first to my knees, like a building being demolished, and then I was on the lawn, the odor of dry grass and wet blood in my nose.

“Say you’re sorry,” he said, his foot poised to kick.

This was an opportunity. A chance to wave the white flag. I would be easy enough, to spit out the words along with the blood in my mouth. Surely I could give him that, only I could not. “Sorry for what?”

“You know what for.”

I looked into his eyes narrowed against the sun, but I didn’t see anyone that I recognized. Would I have surrendered if I thought it would have saved me, if I believed that he was intent on anything other than killing me? I don’t know. But if I were going to die on my front yard, I would die with the taste of pride in my mouth. “I am not sorry.”

But I was sorry. Not for what was between Celestial and me, I would never regret that. I was sorry for a lot of things. I was sorry for Evie, suffering from lupus for so many years. I was sorry for elephants killed for their ivory. I was sorry for Carlos, who traded one family for another. I was sorry for everyone in the world because we all had to die and nobody knew what happened after that. I was sorry for Celestial, who was probably watching from the window. Most of all, I was sorry for Roy. The last time I saw him on that morning before his mother’s wake, he said, “I never had a chance, did I? I only thought I did.”

There was pain, yes, but I figured out how not to feel it. Instead, I thought about Celestial and me and how maybe we just thought we could weather this calamity. We believed we could talk this out, reasoning our way through this. But someone was going to pay for what happened to Roy, just as Roy paid for what happened to that woman. Someone always pays. Bullet don’t have nobody’s name on it, that’s what people say. I think the same is true for vengeance. Maybe even for love. It’s out there, random and deadly, like a tornado.

I wonder about myself sometimes. Roy and Andre circled each other, radiating locker-room energy: violence and competition. They told me to leave, and I did. Why? Was I afraid to bear witness? I’m not an obedient person, but on that Christmas Eve, I did as I was told.

They must have grabbed each other as soon as I shut the door. By the time I made it to a window—peeking through a curtain like a silly southern belle—Roy and Andre were rolling around on the dry lawn, a tangle of arms and legs. I watched for what must have been only several seconds, but whatever the duration, it was too long. When Roy gained the upper hand and pinned Andre to the ground, straddling and punishing him with wind-milling fists and rage, I pulled open the window. The lace curtain floated from the thin rod, covering my eyes like a veil. I yelled their names to the wind, but they either wouldn’t or couldn’t hear me. The grunts of exertion and satisfaction both layered over the gasps of pain and humiliation. All these noises floated up to my window, moving me to run outside with the intention of saving them both.

Stumbling and quaking, I reached the lawn. “November 17!” I yelled, hoping the memory would reach him.

He did pause but only long enough to shake his head in disgust. “It’s too late for all of that, Georgia. No magic words for us anymore.”

Now I had no choice. I pulled the phone from my pocket and aimed it like a gun. With whatever air I could gather, I screamed, “I’m calling the police!”

Roy froze, pulled up short by the threat. “You would do that? You would, wouldn’t you?”

“You’re making me,” I said, fighting to steady my shaking. “Get off him.”

“I don’t care,” Roy said. “Call the law. Fuck you, fuck Andre, and fuck the police.” Andre struggled to free himself, but Roy, as if to underscore his point, delivered a close-fisted blow. Andre shut his eyes but didn’t cry out.

“Please, Roy,” I said. “Please, please don’t make me call the police.”

“Do it,” Roy said. “Do I look like I care? Call them. Send me back. There’s nothing for me here. Send me back.”

“No,” Andre managed to say. His pupils, dark and wide, edged out light irises. “Celestial, you can’t send him back. Not after everything.”

“Do it,” Roy said.

“Celestial.” Andre’s voice was resolute but distant as an overseas call. “Put the phone down. Right now.”

Kneeling, I set it carefully on the lawn like I was surrendering a weapon. Roy released Andre, who rose only to his knees, his body at half-mast. I rushed over to him, but he sent me away. “I’m fine, Celestial,” he said, although he wasn’t. Wood chips clung to his clothes like mites.

“Let me look at your eye.”

“Stand down, Celestial,” he said softly, his teeth streaked pink.

Only a few yards away, Roy flexed his hands in time with his steps. “I didn’t kick him. When he was on the ground, I didn’t kick him. I could have. But I didn’t.”

“But look what you did do,” I said.

“What about you?” Roy was pacing now, back and forth over a short distance, like he was covering the floor of a narrow cell. “It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” he said. “I was just trying to come home. I wanted some time to talk to my wife and figure out what was what. Dre wasn’t supposed to have nothing to do with it.”

I didn’t call the police, but they came anyway, with strobing blue lights but no sirens. The officers, a black woman and a white man, acted put upon to be working on Christmas Eve. I wondered what they were thinking as they regarded us. Both men were bruised and bloody, and I was dressed like holiday cheer, whole and unhurt. I felt like a mother of newborn twins, hurrying from one man to the next, making sure neither was neglected, that both had a piece of me.

“Ma’am,” said the woman cop. “Is everything all right?”

I had not been this close to a police officer since the night at the Piney Woods when I had been pulled from my bed. My body memory smarted as I fingered the scar underneath my chin. Despite the December chill, I felt the spectral heat of that August night. Roy and I had been ordered through crosshairs not to speak and not to move, but my husband reached for me anyway, tangling our fingers for one desperate instant before a cop separated us with his black boot.

“Please don’t hurt him,” I said to the policewoman. “He’s been through a lot.”

“Who are these men?” the white cop asked me. His accent was thick and gooey, all Marietta, turn left at the Big Chicken. I tried to connect with the woman, but she fixed her eyes on the men.

With the voice I used on the telephone, I said, “This is my husband and my neighbor. We had a little bit of an accident, but everything is fine now.”

The woman looked to Andre. “Are you the husband?”

When he didn’t answer, Roy spoke. “I’m the husband. It’s me.”

She nodded at Andre for confirmation. “So you’re the neighbor?”

Rather than say yes, Andre recited his address, pointing at his own front door.

Once the police satisfied themselves, their Merry Christmases resonated like a dark omen. They left without blue lights, just the exhaust souring the air. Once they were gone, Roy sat heavily on the half-moon bench. He gestured toward the seat beside him, but I couldn’t go to him, not with Andre standing a few feet away, his face purpling around the eyes and his split lip showing red meat.

“Georgia,” Roy said, and then his body contracted dry heaving, his head between his knees. I went to him and rubbed his twitching back. “I’m hurting,” he said. “I’m hurting all over.”

“You need to go to the hospital?”

“I want to sleep in my own bed.” He stood up, like a man with somewhere to go. But he only turned toward Old Hickey. “It’s too much.” Then quickly—it must have been quickly—but I somehow took notice of each move, Roy tucked his lips against his teeth, gripped the tree like a brother, and then tipped his head back, presenting his face to the sky before driving his forehead against the ancient bark. The sound was muted, like the wet crack of an egg against the kitchen floor. He did it again, harder this time. I found my feet, and without thinking, I positioned myself between my husband and the tree. Roy craned his head back again, cocked and ready, but now if he chose to drive his skull forward, he would strike me instead.

He executed a little twitch of his knotted shoulders. Then he surveyed Old Hickey, the wood chips scattered in the grass, Andre, me, and lastly himself. “How did this happen?” Roy touched his forehead; the small cut leaked blood over his eyebrow.

Then he sat down on the grass, smoothly but with a sense of mission. “What do you want me to do?” he asked. He turned to Dre with the same curious tone. “Seriously. What do you think I should do?”

Andre sat himself gingerly on the round bench, tensing himself against his injuries. “We’ll help you get set up. If you want, you can stay in my house.”

“I’ll stay in your house and you will stay in my house with my wife? What kind of sense does that make?” Then he looked to me. “Celestial, you knew that wasn’t going to work. You know me. How could I go for that? What were you expecting?”

What did I expect? The truth is that before Roy materialized in my living room, I had forgotten that he was real. For the last two years, he was only an idea to me, this husband of mine who didn’t count. He had been away from me longer that we had been together. I’d convinced myself that there were laws limiting responsibility. When I sent Andre to Louisiana, I hoped that maybe Roy would choose not to come to Atlanta at all, that he would send for his things, that I would be a memory to him in the way that he was a memory for me.

“Roy,” I said, wondering aloud. “Tell the truth. Would you have waited on me for five years?”

He twitched that same shrug. “Celestial,” he said, like he was talking to someone very young, “this shit wouldn’t have happened to you in the first place.”

Andre made a move as if to join us on the dry grass, but I shook my head. His breath escaped his mouth in exhausted puffs of white.

“How does it feel to make all the decisions?” Roy said. “It’s been up to you for the last five years. When we were dating, it was up to me. You had a finger that needed a ring. You remember that? Remember when I was a fiancé you could be proud of, flashing that rock like a searchlight. I won’t lie and say I didn’t get off on it. But now I don’t have anything to offer you but myself. But it’s better than it was last year, when I couldn’t even give you that. So here I am.” He looked to his left. “Your turn, Dre. What do you have to say for yourself?”

Andre spoke to Roy, but he looked at me. “I don’t have to tell Celestial what I feel. She already knows.”

“But tell me,” Roy said. “Tell me how you ended up with your head on my pillow.”

“Roy, man,” Dre said. “I’m sorry for what happened to you. You know I am. So don’t take this as disrespect, but I’m not going to discuss this with you.” He touched his busted lip with his tongue. “You had a time when we could have talked, but you wanted to fight. Now I don’t have anything to say to you.”

“What about you, Georgia? Do you have anything to say? How did you end up picking Dre over me?”

The true answer was that Olive had settled it by lying in her coffin as Big Roy showed me what real communion looked like, what it sounded like, even what it smelled like—fresh earth and sadness. I could never tell Roy that by his parents’ measure, what we had wasn’t a connection for the ages. Our marriage was a sapling graft that didn’t have time to take.

As if he could hear the murmur of my thoughts, he said, “Was Dre just at the right place at the right time? Is this a crime of passion or a crime of opportunity? I need to know.”

How could I tell him that desire didn’t work the way I thought it did when I was younger, my head turned by the electricity of attraction. Andre and I had an everyday thing. We moved each other like we had done it forever, because we had.

When I didn’t answer, Roy pressed on. “How did we end up here? My key works, but you won’t let me in.”

He gathered his body up and plunked down on the bench, blank-eyed and miserable. I turned to Andre, who didn’t meet my gaze. Instead, he studied Roy, broken and shivering.

“You didn’t do this to him,” Andre said. “Don’t let him set that at your feet.”

And he was right. All around Roy were the shards of a broken life, not merely a broken heart. Yet who could deny that I was the only one who could mend him, if he could be healed at all? Women’s work is never easy, never clean.

“You know where I’ll be.” Andre turned toward his own house.

Andre went his way; Roy and I went ours, me leading Roy the way you would provide assistance to a man who has been shot or has lost his sight. As we climbed the stairs to the front walk, I heard Andre’s calm words. “He hit his head pretty bad. He might be concussed. Don’t let him go to sleep right away.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“Thank me for what?” said Andre.

In the bathroom, Roy let me clean his wound, but he refused to go to the emergency room. “I know you can take care of me.”

But there was little to do besides apply antiseptic. As the night stretched on, we asked one another questions to keep sleep at bay, even though both our eyelids hung low, as though weighted down by coins.

“What were you looking for?” I asked him. “When you were going through all the boxes?”

Roy smiled and snugged the tip of his pinky in the gap in his mouth. “My tooth. It wasn’t trash. Why did you throw it out?”

“No,” I said. “I have it.”

“It’s because you love me,” he slurred.

“Stay awake,” I said, shaking him. “People with concussions can die in their sleep.”

“Wouldn’t that be some shit,” he said. “I get out of prison. Come home, find my wife with another man, win her back, and then get in a fight with a tree and wake up dead.” He must have sensed a change in me, even in the dim light. “Did I speak too soon? I didn’t win you back?”

Each time his eyes drooped, I shook him back to life. “Please don’t,” I whispered, opening myself to him, undoing a rusted latch. “I can’t lose you like this.”

This is how I am lonely.

When Celestial opened my front door with her key and walked into the family room, she had changed her clothes, but I was still wearing the fight-filthy jeans from that terrible afternoon. Even before she got close enough for me to see her swollen eyes, I sensed the salt on her like you can on the beach. It wasn’t quite 1 a.m., night but also the next day.

“Hey,” she said, lifting my legs and sitting on the sofa. Setting my calves back on her lap, she added, “Merry Christmas.”

“I guess,” I said, handing her the square glass containing the last of my father’s scotch. As she swallowed it, I smelled Carlos in the fumes.

I inched closer to the back of the sofa and made room. “Lie down,” I said. “I don’t want to talk about this when I can’t feel you next to me.”

She shook her head and stood up. “I need to walk around.” She traveled the room like a ghost, aimless and trapped.

With effort, I pulled myself to a seated position. I’d taped my ribs, but it hurt with every breath. “So I take it that Roy is still alive?”

“Dre,” she said. Finding the place in the room farthest from me, she sat on the white carpet and crossed her legs. Her bare feet looked naked and cold. “He’s wrecked.”

“That doesn’t have anything to do with us.”

“There’s so much that you don’t know. Things people like us can’t even imagine.”

“Is that why you’re hiding in the corner? Celestial, what are you doing?” I beckoned to her. “Come here, girl. Talk to me.”

She returned to the sofa and we lay down. Celestial fitted herself against me, her forehead against mine.

“I married him for a reason,” she said. “You can never really unlove somebody. Maybe it changes shape, but it’s there.”

“You really believe that?”

“Dre, we have so much,” she said, “and he has nothing. Not even his mother. The whole time he was talking, my face was on fire, just like at Olive’s funeral. Her handprint stinging on my cheek, making sure I didn’t forget. It’s hot right now.” She reached for my hand. “Touch it.”

I nudged her away from me, suddenly irritated by her touch, by the scotch on her breath, even the scent of lavender on her neck. I didn’t want to cradle her talk about ghost slaps, dead mothers, and the right thing to do.

“Just go,” I said. “If you want leave me, just do it. Don’t try to make it supernatural. You are the one making this choice, Celestial. You.”

“You know what I mean, Dre. We’ve been lucky. We were born lucky. Roy’s starting from scratch. Less than scratch. You saw him trying to kill himself up under that tree. He wanted to crack his own skull.”

“Actually, I was the one he was trying to kill.”

“Dre,” she said. “You and me, we are just heartbroken. That’s it. Only heartbroken.”

“Maybe that’s it for you,” I said.

“Baby,” she said. “Can’t you see? Whatever I do to you, I am doing to myself.”

“Then don’t do it. You don’t have to.”

She shook her and said, “You didn’t see him. If you had seen him, I know you would agree with everything I’m saying.”

“I need you, Celestial,” I whispered. “All my life.”

She shifted so that we were touching again. When she closed her eyes, I felt the tickle of her lashes.

“I have to do this,” she said.

Celestial owed me nothing. A few months ago, this was the beauty of what we had. No debts. No trespasses. She said that love can change its shape, but for me at least, this is a lie. I kept my arms around her, my body aching and cramped. But I held her until muscles failed, because when I released her, she would be gone.

I woke up at a quarter past eleven and the clean air smelled like trees. Except for her hair, Celestial was my Georgia girl again. I stood up and she embraced me, spreading her fingers across my shoulders. Her skin was warm like a cup of cocoa.

“Merry Christmas, baby,” I said, just like Otis Redding.

“Merry Christmas,” she replied with a smile.

“With everything, I almost forgot about the holidays,” I said, wishing, too late, that I had used some of Olive’s money to buy Celestial a perfect gift, a big thing in a small package.

“Don’t be silly,” she said. “You’re safe. In one piece.”

She knew this wasn’t completely true. I was embarrassed remembering Christmas Eve, not the violence but my desperate confessions as she kept me awake to save my life. When I told her about the pear, she soothed me with a hymn, the same one she sang for Olive. I had forgotten the power of her voice, the way she scuffed you in order to buff you smooth. It made me think of Davina and her means of restoring a man. What would Celestial think if she knew how I had readied myself for this homecoming by breaking a gentle woman’s heart? It costs you to hurt people. But I supposed that Celestial knew that already.

“You know what I want for Christmas?” I said. “My two front teeth. Really just that bottom one.”

She wiggled away and went to the dresser wearing a slip that made her seem like a virgin. The first time I saw her wear white was our wedding day, and the last time had been the night when the door was kicked open.

On her dresser rested a jewelry case that was a replica of the dresser itself. She opened it and retrieved a little box. She handed it to me; I shook it and was rewarded with the hard rattle of a fragment of lost bone.

“Remember that night? You had me out here trying to be Superman.”

“You rose to the occasion,” she said. “More than rose—soared.”

“I hope this doesn’t come off wrong. I know you’re an independent woman and everything. You got your own money and your daddy’s money, too. But I liked being able to save you. Chasing that kid down the street, I was a hero. Even when he kicked my tooth right out of my head.”

“He could have killed you,” she said. “I didn’t think about that until you caught up with him.”

“He could have, but he didn’t. No sense worrying about things that didn’t happen.” I took her hand. “I’m not even worried about what did happen. This is a fresh day. A fresh start.”

We cooked a late breakfast in our nightclothes. I volunteered to make salmon croquettes. She put herself in charge of grits. As she stirred the pan, a ruby shimmered dark and hot on her right hand.

The phone rang and Celestial answered it “Happy Holidays” like it was the name of a business. From her side, I could tell she was talking to her parents. Mr. and Mrs. Davenport, eccentric genius daddy and schoolteacher mama, safe in their haunted house. I missed them, all that comfort and security. I held out my hand, hoping she would pass me the phone, but she shook her head, mouthing, Shhh.

“Are we going over there for dinner?” I asked after she hung up.

“We’re kind of not getting along,” she said. “Besides, I’m not ready to bring the world into this yet.”

“Christmas is my favorite holiday,” I said, remembering. “Ever since I had teeth, Big Roy would slice up an apple and we’d share it. When he was growing up, all he would get under the tree was the one apple. He didn’t know other kids were getting toy cars, school clothes, and stuff. He was excited for what he got—a piece of fruit all to himself.”

“You never told me that,” said Celestial.

“I guess I didn’t want you feeling sorry for us, because really, it’s one of my happiest memories. After we got married, I slipped down here on Christmas morning to have my apple.”

She looked the way you do when you figure something out. “You could have told me. I’m not how you think I am.”

“Georgia,” I said. “I know that now. Don’t be upset. All that was so long ago. I made mistakes. You made mistakes. It’s all right. Nobody is holding anything against anyone.”

Seeming to think it over, she pulled open the oven, taking out a pan of toast cooked the way Olive used to make it, soft on the bottom, crispy on the top except for five dots of butter. She held the bread out for my inspection. Her face said, I’m trying. I am trying so hard.

I rummaged in the fridge until I found a big red teacher-apple. The knife I pulled from the block was small but sharp. I cut away a thick slice and handed it to her before carving one for myself. “Merry Christmas.”

She held the fruit aloft. “Cheers. Bon appétit.”

That was the first moment when it felt right, when true reconciliation seemed possible.

The taste of the apple, sweet chased by twinge of tart, reminded me of Big Roy. I pictured him all alone on this holiday. Wickliffe would be off with his daughter and grands, and Big Roy didn’t much truck with anybody else.

“Celestial,” I said. “I know I said we weren’t going to get stuck in the past. But I have one more thing I need to talk about.”

Chewing her apple, she nodded, but her eyes were afraid.

“I’m not trying to fight,” I said. “I swear I’m not. This isn’t about Andre, and it’s not about having kids. It’s about my mother.”

She nodded and covered my hand with her own, sticky with apple juice.

I took a breath. “Celestial, Big Roy told me that you told Olive about Walter. He said it killed her. Actually killed her. He said she was getting better, but when you told her about Walter, she gave up. She couldn’t see the point anymore.”

“No,” she said as I pulled my hands from hers. “No, no, no. It wasn’t like that.”

“Then what was it like?” I promised her that I wasn’t mad, but maybe I was. The apple in my mouth tasted like dirt.

“I did go see her at the end. She wasn’t dying soft, Roy. It was bad. The hospice nurse tried, but Olive wouldn’t take the pain medicine because she thought it would kill her faster, and she was trying to live for you. When I went there, her lungs were so full of cancer that I could hear the clogging in her chest like when you blow bubbles in a glass of milk. She was fighting it hard, but she couldn’t win; her fingers were tinted blue and her lips, too. I asked your father to leave the room, and I told her everything.”

“Why? How could you do that? She didn’t last another day.” Olive died alone while Big Roy was off to the 7-Eleven to get her some applesauce. I missed her, he told me. I got back and she was already gone. “My mama didn’t deserve that.”

“No.” She shook her head. “You can blame me for a lot but not for that. When I told her, she shook her head, looked up at the ceiling, and said, ‘God sure is funny. Sending Othaniel to the rescue.’ Your daddy thinks she gave up, but that’s not what it was. When she knew you weren’t by yourself, she could finally let go.”

Celestial crossed her arms over her chest like she was holding herself together. “I know you said not to. But if you had been there …”

And now I held myself with the same posture, arms crossed and gripping my sides. “It wasn’t my fault that I wasn’t there. I would have been there if they had let me.”

We sat at that table, neither able to comfort the other, her remembering being a bystander to my mother’s suffering and me suffering because I was denied the experience.

She composed herself first, took the apple from the table, and sliced off another piece for herself and one for me. “Eat,” she said.

Night followed day, as it always does, and each night promised a day soon to come. This is something I took comfort in these last bad years. While Celestial showered, I called Big Roy, and I could hear the melancholy in the way he spoke our mutual name.

“You okay, Daddy?”

“Yes, Roy. I’m okay. Got a little indigestion. Sister Franklin brought me a plate, but I ate too much of it, too fast maybe. She’s not a cook like your mama but not half-bad.”

“It’s okay to enjoy it, Daddy. Go ahead and like her.”

He laughed, but he didn’t sound like himself. “You trying to marry me off so you don’t have to come home and take care of me?”

“I want you to be happy.”

“You’re free, son. That makes me happy enough for the rest of my days.”

Next, I rang Davina as the steam from Celestial’s shower wafted into the bedroom.

“Merry Christmas,” I said to her. In the background was music and laughing. “Is this a bad time?”

She hesitated, then said, “Let me take the phone outside.” As I waited, I imagined her with a tuft of tinsel glinting in her hair, her hand on her hip. When she came back, I tried to sound casual.

“I just want to say Merry Christmas.” I held the phone with both hands like I was worried that somebody was going to snatch it from me.

“Roy Hamilton, I have one question for you. You ready? Here it is: something or nothing. This could be the eggnog talking, but I need to know. What happened with us, was it something or nothing?”

This is how it was with women, pop quizzes with no right answer. “Something?” I said with a little question curling up like a tail on a pig.

“You’re not sure? Listen, for me, Roy Hamilton, it’s something. It’s something to me.”

“Davina, don’t make me lie. I’m married. I found out that I’m still married.”

She cut me off. “I didn’t ask you all that. All I asked is something or nothing.”

Twisting the phone cord, I recalled our time together. Could it have been only two nights? But those two nights were the start of the rest of my life. I crawled to her door, but I walked away on my own two feet. “Something,” I said, leaning in. “Definitely something. I wish I could say what.”

I hung up as Celestial emerged, looking herself like a Christmas present, dressed in a little lace-nightie thing that I recognized as something that I’d bought for her. She had complained that it looked itchy, meaning that it looked cheap. I had paid good money for it, but now that she wore it, I could see her point. She twirled. “Like it?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I do. For real.”

She lay back on the pillows like a goddess on her day off, her chest dusted with fine flecks of gold. “C’mere,” she said, sounding like someone on television, not like a real person in real life.

I went to her, but I didn’t hit the light.

“One more thing,” I said. “One more thing to clear the air. Okay? Before we do this, okay?”

“You don’t have to. Didn’t you say we’re starting fresh?”

I smarted at the word fresh. Back in Eloe, it meant not getting ahead of yourself. But I knew how she intended it. Fresh was this fantasy of entering a clean, uncluttered room and shutting the door behind you. “I don’t want to start fresh. I want to start real.”

“Tell me then.”

“Okay,” I began. “When I was in Eloe for those few days, I was in a hard place. It was a lot to deal with. There’s a girl. Someone from high school. She invited me to her place for dinner, and one thing led to another.” Strange as this may seem, my confession felt familiar, like a favorite pair of jeans. This dynamic was a holdover from before, when we quarreled as only lovers do. This time, Celestial had no right to be jealous, but since when do you need a right to feel the way you felt? I smiled a little, remembering the time that she threw away my slice of wedding cake and drank the rest of the champagne by herself. Maybe I missed the fighting as much as the loving, because with Celestial, I had never known one without the other. Our passion was powerful and dangerous as an unstable atom. I’ll never forget our kiss-and-make-up when she bit my chest, leaving a purple ring that gave me a good hurt for a day and a half. With a woman like that, you knew you were in something.

Celestial said, “How could I be mad at you? I’m not a hypocrite.”

I studied her face, which reflected only weariness. She may as well have shrugged. I had been gone a long time, but I still knew her a little bit. There are things in a core of a person that didn’t change. Celestial was an intense person. Yesterday under the tree, she fought to maintain her composure, to keep her fire in check, but I could feel her burning. “Georgia, do you know what I’m trying to say?”

“I know,” she went on. “You had been through a lot. I know it didn’t mean anything. That’s what you’re about to say, right?”

“Celestial,” I said, catching her up in my arms. I was wearing my trousers and socks, while she was nearly nude. She smelled of glitter powder and soap. “You don’t care, do you?”

“It’s not that I don’t care. I’m trying to be an adult about it.”

“I called her a second ago while you were in the shower.” I slowed my delivery, letting each word land hard. I didn’t enjoy unspooling the details. I swear, I didn’t want to hurt Celestial, but I did need to know if I could. I had to know if I still had that kind of power, that kind of sway. “When I was with her, she showed me how to be myself again, or maybe she introduced me to my new self, the person I have to be from here on out. It wasn’t purely sexual. I can’t lie and tell you that it’s nothing. She treated me like a man, or maybe just a human being.”

Celestial’s look was as blank as an egg. “Well, what’s her name?”

“Davina Hardrick. She asked what was up with the two of us. I mean me and her, not me and you.”

“What did you say?” Celestial sounded merely curious.

“I told her I was married.”

Celestial nodded as she killed the light and pulled me to the bed. “Yes, you are a married man.”

I lay in the dark, feeling unsure, as if I had forgotten my own name.

Davina said that the only question is something or nothing, but that’s as much a fantasy as a fresh start. For the rest of our lives there would be something between me and Celestial. Neither of us would ever enjoy the perfect peace of nothing. After the clock by the bed flashed midnight and Christmas was over, I felt my wife nibbling kisses across my shoulders. I smelled unhappiness on her breath, but she continued caressing me, saying my name in a mournful whisper. I turned to face her; Celestial’s head in my hand was as fragile as a lightbulb. “You don’t have to, Georgia.”

She shushed me with a kiss I wasn’t sure I wanted. In the light of the night table clock, I made out her taut brow and quivering eyelids. “We don’t have to,” I said. “We could just go to sleep.”

Her skin was hot against my thigh as I fingered the lace trim of her nightie. My hands, on their own, sought the rest of her, but her muscles tensed in the wake of my fingers. It was as though I were turning her to stone, cell by cell.

“This is how I love you,” she said, lying herself on the bank of pillows. Even in the dark, I could make out the rapid rise and fall of her chest, her bird-in-the-hand breaths. “Please, Roy. Please let me make this right.”

When I was in prison, Olive visited me every weekend until she was no longer able. I was always glad to see her but always humiliated for her to see me. One Sunday, she was different, but I couldn’t quite say how. She must have known about the cancer, but she didn’t tell me. What I noticed was her breathing; Olive was aware of it and her attention was catching. She took in air then like Celestial did now, up tempo and afraid.

“Little Roy,” Olive said. “There is no doubt in my mind. I just need to hear from your own lips that you didn’t do it.”

I leaned back, flinching as though she’d spit in my face. Olive reached for me the way you would lunge for a glass tumbling from the table. “I know you didn’t,” she cooed. “I know you didn’t. Please let me hear you say it.”

“I was with Celestial the whole time. You can ask her.”

“I don’t want to ask her,” my mother said. “I want it from you.”

I can’t remember this day without hearing the air around her words, without imagining the tumors multiplying, consuming her body. Olive was dying and I spoke to her with bitterness in my mouth. That I didn’t know makes no difference.

“Mama,” I said, talking to her like she was slow or didn’t speak English. “I am not a rapist.”

“Little Roy,” she began, but I cut her off.

“I don’t want to talk anymore.”

When she left, she said, “I believe you.”

As I watched her walk away, I made note of everything about her that I didn’t admire. I ignored the devotion that she wore like a cape, I paid no heed of her strength or hardworking beauty. I sat there thinking of all I didn’t love about her, too angry to even say good-bye.

In the quiet room, my wife lifted her lovely arms, encircling my neck, pulling me to her with a power I didn’t know she had. “I want you to be okay.” Her voice was brave and determined.

“I didn’t do it,” I said. “I never touched that lady. She thought it was me. You couldn’t tell her that I didn’t break into her room and hold her down. When she was on the stand, I couldn’t even look in her face, because in her eyes, I was a barbarian, worse than a dog. When I looked at her looking at me, I became what she thought I was. There’s nothing worse that you can say about a man.”

“Shhh,” Celestial said. “All that’s over.”

“Nothing is ever over,” I said, unwinding her arms from my shoulders. I lay beside her, remembering us sprawled on the asphalt, forbidden to touch. “Celestial,” I said, surprised by the bass of my own voice in my chest. “I am not a rapist. Do you hear what I’m trying to tell you?”

“Yes,” she said, but she seemed confused. “I never thought you did it. I know who I married.”

“Georgia,” I said. “I know who I married, too. You’re in me. When I touch you, your flesh communicates with my bones. You think I can’t feel how sad you are?”

“I’m scared,” she said, her fingers transmitting a miserable willingness. “It’s hard to start over.”

The vast generosity of women is a mysterious tunnel, and nobody knows where it leads. The writing on the walls spells out trick questions, and as a man, you must know that you cannot reason your way out. What unkindness showed me that she loved me by revealing the ways that she didn’t love me? Celestial was offering herself to me like a banquet prepared in the presence of my enemies, like a flawless red pear. What cruelty revealed that she cared by making me understand the limits of the same?

“Listen,” I said with what threatened to be my last breath. “Listen, Georgia. Hear what I’m about to say.” I made my words hard and she stiffened against them. To make amends, I spoke tenderly like I was addressing a butterfly. “Celestial, I will never force myself upon a woman.” I removed her two frightened hands from my body and held them between my own. “Do you hear me? I will not force you. Even if you let me, even if you want me to, I will not do it.”

I kissed her finger near the base, where my ring once rested. “Georgia,” I said, beginning a sentence I couldn’t bear to complete.

“I tried,” she began.

“Shhh … Just sleep, Georgia. Just sleep.”

But neither of us closed our eyes against the immeasurable dark of that silent night.

Acknowledgments