Contents

Cover

About the Author

Also by Toni Morrison

Title Page

Prologue

1. Portrait

2. Friend

3. Stranger

4. Benefactor

5. Lover

6. Husband

7. Guardian

8. Father

9. Phantom

Copyright

About the Author

Toni Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. She is the author of eight novels, including The Bluest Eye, Beloved (made into a major film), and most recently Paradise, and has received the National Book Critics Circle Award and a Pulitzer Prize. She is Robert F. Goheen Professor at Princeton University.

ALSO BY TONI MORRISON

Fiction

Paradise

Jazz

Beloved

Tar Baby

Song of Solomon

Sula

The Bluest Eye

Non-Fiction

The Dancing Mind

Playing in the Dark:

Whiteness and the Literary Imagination

Love

Toni Morrison

The women’s legs are spread wide open, so I hum. Men grow irritable, but they know it’s all for them. They relax. Standing by, unable to do anything but watch, is a trial, but I don’t say a word. My nature is a quiet one, anyway. As a child I was considered respectful; as a young woman I was called discreet. Later on I was thought to have the wisdom maturity brings. Nowadays silence is looked on as odd and most of my race has forgotten the beauty of meaning much by saying little. Now tongues work all by themselves with no help from the mind. Still, I used to be able to have normal conversations, and when the need arose, I could make a point strong enough to stop a womb—or a knife. Not anymore, because back in the seventies, when women began to straddle chairs and dance crotch out on television, when all the magazines started featuring behinds and inner thighs as though that’s all there is to a woman, well, I shut up altogether. Before women agreed to spread in public, there used to be secrets—some to hold, some to tell. Now? No. Barefaced being the order of the day, I hum. The words dance in my head to the music in my mouth. People come in here for a plate of crawfish, or to pass the time, and never notice or care that they do all the talking. I’m background—the movie music that comes along when the sweethearts see each other for the first time, or when the husband is walking the beachfront alone wondering if anybody saw him doing the bad thing he couldn’t help. My humming encourages people; frames their thoughts like when Mildred Pierce decides she has to go to jail for her daughter. I suspect, soft as it is, my music has that kind of influence too. The way “Mood Indigo” drifting across the waves can change the way you swim. It doesn’t make you dive in, but it can set your stroke, or trick you into believing you are both smart and lucky. So why not swim farther and a little farther still? What’s the deep to you? It’s way down below, and has nothing to do with blood made bold by coronets and piano keys, does it? Of course, I don’t claim that kind of power. My hum is mostly below range, private; suitable for an old woman embarrassed by the world; her way of objecting to how the century is turning out. Where all is known and nothing understood. Maybe it was always so, but it didn’t strike me until some thirty years ago that prostitutes, looked up to for their honesty, have always set the style. Well, maybe it wasn’t their honesty; maybe it was their success. Still, straddling a chair or dancing half naked on TV, these nineties women are not all that different from the respectable women who live around here. This is coast country, humid and God-fearing, where female recklessness runs too deep for short shorts or thongs or cameras. But then or now, decent underwear or none, wild women never could hide their innocence—a kind of pity-kitty hopefulness that their prince was on his way. Especially the tough ones with their box cutters and dirty language, or the glossy ones with two-seated cars and a pocketbook full of dope. Even the ones who wear scars like presidential medals and stockings rolled at their ankles can’t hide the sugar-child, the winsome baby girl curled up somewhere inside, between the ribs, say, or under the heart. Naturally all of them have a sad story: too much notice, not enough, or the worst kind. Some tale about dragon daddies and false-hearted men, or mean mamas and friends who did them wrong. Each story has a monster in it who made them tough instead of brave, so they open their legs rather than their hearts where that folded child is tucked.

Sometimes the cut is so deep no woe-is-me tale is enough. Then the only thing that does the trick, that explains the craziness heaping up, holding down, and making women hate one another and ruin their children is an outside evil. People in Up Beach, where I’m from, used to tell about some creatures called Police-heads—dirty things with big hats who shoot up out of the ocean to harm loose women and eat disobedient children. My mother knew them when she was a girl and people dreamed wide awake. They disappeared for a while but came back with new and bigger hats starting in the forties when a couple of “See there, what’d I tell you?” things happened at the shore. Like that woman who furrowed in the sand with her neighbor’s husband and the very next day suffered a stroke at the cannery, the grappling knife still in her hand. She wasn’t but twenty-nine at the time. Another woman—she lived over in Silk and wouldn’t have anything to do with Up Beach people—well, she hid a flashlight and a purchase deed in the sand of her father-in-law’s beachfront one evening only to have a loggerhead dig them up in the night. The miserable daughter-in-law broke her wrist trying to keep the breezes and the Klan away from the papers she’d stolen. Of course nobody flat out saw any Police-heads during the shame of those guilty women, but I knew they were around and knew what they looked like, too, because I’d already seen them in 1942 when some hardheaded children swam past the safety rope and drowned. As soon as they were pulled under, thunderclouds gathered above a screaming mother and a few dumbstruck picnickers and, in a blink, those clouds turned into gate-mouthed profiles wearing wide-brimmed hats. Some folks heard rumbling but I swear I heard whoops of joy. From that time on through the fifties they loitered above the surf or hovered over the beach ready to pounce around sunset (you know, when lust is keenest, when loggerheads hunt nests and negligent parents get drowsy). Of course most demons get hungry at supper-time, like us. But Police-heads liked to troll at night, too, especially when the hotel was full of visitors drunk with dance music, or salt air, or tempted by starlit water. Those were the days when Cosey’s Hotel and Resort was the best and best-known vacation spot for colored folk on the East Coast. Everybody came: Lil Green, Fatha Hines, T-Bone Walker, Jimmy Lunceford, the Drops of Joy, and guests from as far away as Michigan and New York couldn’t wait to get down here. Sooker Bay swirled with first lieutenants and brand-new mothers; with young schoolteachers, landlords, doctors, businessmen. All over the place children rode their fathers’ leg shanks and buried uncles up to their necks in sand. Men and women played croquet and got up baseball teams whose goal was to knock a homer into the waves. Grandmothers watched over red thermos jugs with white handles and hampers full of crabmeat salad, ham, chicken, yeast rolls, and loaves of lemon-flavored cake, oh my. Then, all of a sudden, in 1958, bold as a posse, the Police-heads showed up in bright morning. A clarinet player and his bride drowned before breakfast. The inner tube they were floating on washed ashore dragging wads of scale-cluttered beard hair. Whether the bride had played around during the honeymoon was considered and whispered about, but the facts were muddy. She sure had every opportunity. Cosey’s Resort had more handsome single men per square foot than anyplace outside Atlanta or even Chicago. They came partly for the music but mostly to dance by the sea with pretty women.

After the drowned couple was separated—sent to different funeral parlors—you’d think women up to no good and muleheaded children wouldn’t need further warning, because they knew there was no escape: fast as lightning, nighttime or day, Police-heads could blast up out of the waves to punish wayward women or swallow the misbehaving young. Only when the resort failed did they sneak off like pickpockets from a breadline. A few people still sinking crab castles in the back bays probably remember them, but with no more big bands or honeymooners, with the boats and picnics and swimmers gone, when Sooker Bay became a treasury of sea junk and Up Beach itself drowned, nobody needed or wanted to recall big hats and scaly beards. But it’s forty years on, now; the Coseys have disappeared from public view and I’m afraid for them almost every day.

Except for me and a few fish shacks, Up Beach is twenty feet underwater; but the hotel part of Cosey’s Resort is still standing. Sort of standing. Looks more like it’s rearing backwards—away from hurricanes and a steady blow of sand. Odd what oceanfront can do to empty buildings. You can find the prettiest shells right up on the steps, like scattered petals or cameos from a Sunday dress, and you wonder how they got there, so far from the ocean. Hills of sand piling in porch corners and between banister railings are whiter than the beach, and smoother, like twice-sifted flour. Foxglove grows waist high around the gazebo, and roses, which all the time hate our soil, rage here, with more thorns than blackberries and weeks of beet red blossoms. The wood siding of the hotel looks silver-plated, its peeling paint like the streaks on an unpolished tea service. The big double doors are padlocked. So far nobody has smashed their glass panels. Nobody could stand to do it because the panels mirror your own face as well as the view behind your back: acres of chive grass edging the sparkly beach, a movie-screen sky, and an ocean that wants you more than anything. No matter the outside loneliness, if you look inside, the hotel seems to promise you ecstasy and the company of all your best friends. And music. The shift of a shutter hinge sounds like the cough of a trumpet; piano keys waver a quarter note above the wind so you might miss the hurt jamming those halls and closed-up rooms.

Our weather is soft, mostly, with peculiar light. Pale mornings fade into white noons, then by three o’clock the colors are savage enough to scare you. Jade and sapphire waves fight each other, kicking up enough foam to wash sheets in. An evening sky behaves as though it’s from some other planet—one without rules, where the sun can be plum purple if it wants to and clouds can be red as poppies. Our shore is like sugar, which is what the Spaniards thought of when they first saw it. Sucra, they called it, a name local whites tore up for all time into Sooker.

Nobody could get enough of our weather except when the cannery smell got to the beach and into the hotel. Then guests discovered what Up Beach people put up with every day and thought that was why Mr. Cosey moved his family out of the hotel and built that big house on Monarch Street. Fish odor didn’t used to be all that bad a thing in these parts. Like marsh stench and privies, it just added another variety to the senses. But in the sixties it became a problem. A new generation of females complained about what it did to their dresses, their appetite, and their idea of romance. This was around the time the world decided perfume was the only smell the nose was meant for. I remember Vida trying to calm the girlfriend of a famous singer who was carrying on about her steak tasting like conch. That hurt me, because I have never failed in the kitchen. Later on, Mr. Cosey told people that’s what ruined his business—that the whites had tricked him, let him buy all the oceanfront he wanted because the cannery, so close by, kept it unprofitable. The fish smell had turned his resort into a joke. But I know that the smell that blanketed Up Beach hit Sooker Bay only once or twice a month—and never from December to April, when crab castles were empty and the cannery closed. No. I don’t care what he told people, something else wrecked his resort. Freedom, May said. She tried hard to keep the place going when her father-in-law lost interest, and was convinced that civil rights destroyed her family and its business. By which she meant colored people were more interested in blowing up cities than dancing by the seashore. She was like that, May; but what started out as mule-headed turned into crack-brained. Fact is, folks who bragged about Cosey vacations in the forties boasted in the sixties about Hyatts, Hiltons, cruises to the Bahamas and Ocho Rios. Truth is, neither shellfish nor integration was to blame. Never mind the woman with the conch-flavored steak, customers will sit next to a privy if it’s the only way they can hear Wilson Pickett or Nellie Lutcher. Besides, who can tell one odor from another while pressed close to a partner on a crowded dance floor listening to “Harbor Lights”? And while May kept blaming Martin Luther King every day for her troubles, the hotel still made money, although with a different clientele. Listen to me: something else was to blame. Besides, Mr. Cosey was a smart man. He helped more colored people here than forty years of government programs. And he wasn’t the one who boarded up the hotel and sold seventy-five acres to an Equal Opportunity developer for thirty-two houses built so cheap my shack puts them to shame. At least my floors are hand-planed oak, not some slicked-up pine, and if my beams aren’t ruler smooth, they’re true and properly aged when hoisted.

Before Up Beach drowned in a hurricane called Agnes, there was a drought with no name at all. The sale had just closed, the acres barely plotted, when Up Beach mothers were pumping mud from their spigots. Dried-up wells and brackey water scared them so, they gave up the sight of the sea and applied for a two-percent HUD mortgage. Rainwater wasn’t good enough for them anymore. Trouble, unemployment, hurricanes following droughts, marshland turned into mud cakes so dry even the mosquitoes quit—I saw all that as life simply being itself. Then the government houses went up and they named the neighborhood Oceanside—which it isn’t. The developers started out selling to Vietnam veterans and retired whites, but when Oceanside became a target for people thrown out of work onto food stamps, churches and this affirmative action stuff got busy. Welfare helped some till urban renewal came to town. Then there were jobs all over the place. Now, it’s full of people commuting to offices and hospital labs twenty-two miles north. Traveling back and forth from those cheap, pretty houses to malls and movieplexes, they’re so happy they haven’t had a cloudy thought, let alone a memory of Police-heads. They didn’t cross my mind either until I started to miss the Cosey women and wonder if they’d finally killed each other. Who besides me would know if they were dead in there—one vomiting on the steps still holding the knife that cut the throat of the one that fed her the poison? Or if one had a stroke after shooting the other and, not able to move, starved to death right in front of the refrigerator? They wouldn’t be found for days. Not until Sandler’s boy needed his weekly pay. Maybe I best leave off the TV for a while.

I used to see one of them driving along in that rusty old Oldsmobile—to the bank or in here, once in a while, for Salisbury steak. Otherwise they haven’t left that house in years. Not since one came back carrying a Wal-Mart shopping bag and you could tell by the set of her shoulders she was whipped. The white Samsonite luggage she left with was nowhere in sight. I thought the other one would slam the door in her face, but she didn’t. I guess they both knew they deserved each other. Meaner than most and standoffish, they have the regular attention that disliked folks attract. They live like queens in Mr. Cosey’s house, but since that girl moved in there a while ago with a skirt short as underpants and no underpants at all, I’ve been worried about them leaving me here with nothing but an old folks’ tale to draw on. I know it’s trash: just another story made up to scare wicked females and correct unruly children. But it’s all I have. I know I need something else. Something better. Like a story that shows how brazen women can take a good man down. I can hum to that.

1

PORTRAIT

THE DAY SHE walked the streets of Silk, a chafing wind kept the temperature low and the sun was helpless to move outdoor thermometers more than a few degrees above freezing. Tiles of ice had formed at the shoreline and, inland, the thrown-together houses on Monarch Street whined like puppies. Ice slick gleamed, then disappeared in the early evening shadow, causing the sidewalks she marched along to undermine even an agile tread, let alone one with a faint limp. She should have bent her head and closed her eyes to slits in that weather, but being a stranger, she stared wide-eyed at each house, searching for the address that matched the one in the advertisement: One Monarch Street. Finally she turned into a driveway where Sandler Gibbons stood in his garage door ripping the seam from a sack of Ice-Off. He remembers the crack of her heels on concrete as she approached; the angle of her hip as she stood there, the melon sun behind her, the garage light in her face. He remembers the pleasure of her voice when she asked for directions to the house of women he has known all his life.

“You sure?” he asked when she told him the address.

She took a square of paper from a jacket pocket, held it with ungloved fingers while she checked, then nodded.

Sandler Gibbons scanned her legs and reckoned her knees and thighs were stinging from the cold her tiny skirt exposed them to. Then he marveled at the height of her bootheels, the cut of her short leather jacket. At first he’d thought she wore a hat, something big and fluffy to keep her ears and neck warm. Then he realized that it was hair—blown forward by the wind, distracting him from her face. She looked to him like a sweet child, fine-boned, gently raised but lost.

“Cosey women,” he said. “That’s their place you looking for. It ain’t been number one for a long time now, but you can’t tell them that. Can’t tell them nothing. It 1410 or 1401, probably.”

Now it was her turn to question his certainty.

“I’m telling you,” he said, suddenly irritable—the wind, he thought, tearing his eyes. “Go on up thataway. You can’t miss it ’less you try to. Big as a church.”

She thanked him but did not turn around when he hollered at her back, “Or a jailhouse.”

Sandler Gibbons didn’t know what made him say that. He believed his wife was on his mind. She would be off the bus by now, stepping carefully on slippery pavement until she got to their driveway. There she would be safe from falling because, with the forethought and common sense he was known for, he was prepared for freezing weather in a neighborhood that had no history of it. But the “jailhouse” comment meant he was really thinking of Romen, his grandson, who should have been home from school an hour and a half ago. Fourteen, way too tall, and getting muscled, there was a skulk about him, something furtive that made Sandler Gibbons stroke his thumb every time the boy came into view. He and Vida Gibbons had been pleased to have him, raise him, when their daughter and son-in-law enlisted. Mother in the army; father in the merchant marines. The best choice out of none when only pickup work (housecleaning in Harbor for the women, hauling road trash for the men) was left after the cannery closed. “Parents idle, children sidle,” his own mother used to say. Getting regular yard work helped, but not enough to keep Romen on the dime and out of the sight line of ambitious, under-occupied police. His own boyhood had been shaped by fear of vigilantes, but dark blue uniforms had taken over posse work now. What thirty years ago was a one-sheriff, one-secretary department was now four patrol cars and eight officers with walkie-talkies to keep the peace.

He was wiping salt dust from his hands when the two people under his care arrived at the same time, one hollering, “Hoo! Am I glad you did this! Thought I’d break my neck.” The other saying, “What you mean, Gran? I had your arm all the way from the bus.”

“Course you did, baby.” Vida Gibbons smiled, hoping to derail any criticism her husband might be gathering against her grandson.

At dinner, the scalloped potatoes having warmed his mood, Sandler picked up the gossip he’d begun while the three of them were setting the table.

“What did you say she wanted?” Vida asked, frowning. The ham slices had toughened with reheating.

“Looking for those Cosey women, I reckon. That was the address she had. The old address, I mean. When wasn’t nobody out here but them.”

“That was written on her paper?” She poured a little raisin sauce over her meat.

“I didn’t look at it, woman. I just saw her check it. Little scrap of something looked like it came from a newspaper.”

“You were concentrating on her legs, I guess. Lot of information there.”

Romen covered his mouth and closed his eyes.

“Vida, don’t belittle me in front of the boy.”

“Well, the first thing you told me was about her skirt. I’m just following your list of priorities.”

“I said it was short, that’s all.”

“How short?” Vida winked at Romen.

“They wear them up to here, Gran.” Romen’s hand disappeared under the table.

“Up to where?” Vida leaned sideways.

“Will you two quit? I’m trying to tell you something.”

“You think she’s a niece, maybe?” asked Vida.

“Could be. Didn’t look like one, though. Except for size, looked more like Christine’s people.” Sandler motioned for the jar of jalapeños.

“Christine don’t have any people left.”

“Maybe she had a daughter you don’t know about.” Romen just wanted to be in the conversation, but as usual, they looked at him as if his fly was open.

“Watch your mouth,” said his grandfather.

“I’m just talking, Gramp. How would I know?”

“You wouldn’t, so don’t butt in.”

“Stch.”

“You sucking your teeth at me?”

“Sandler, lighten up. Can’t you leave him alone for a minute?” Vida asked.

Sandler opened his mouth to defend his position, but decided to bite the tip off the pepper instead.

“Anyway, the less I hear about those Cosey girls, the better I like it,” said Vida.

“Girls?” Romen made a face.

“Well, that’s how I think of them. Hincty, snotty girls with as much cause to look down on people as a pot looks down on a skillet.”

“They’re cool with me,” said Romen. “The skinny one, anyway.”

Vida glared at him. “Don’t you believe it. She pays you; that’s all you need from either one.”

Romen swallowed. Now she was on his back. “Why you all make me work there if they that bad?”

“Make you?” Sandler scratched a thumb.

“Well, you know, send me over there.”

“Drown this boy, Vida. He don’t know a favor from a fart.”

“We sent you because you need some kind of job, Romen. You’ve been here four months and it’s time you took on some of the weight.”

Romen tried to get the conversation back to his employers’ weaknesses and away from his own. “Miss Christine always gives me something good to eat.”

“I don’t want you eating off her stove.”

“Vida.”

“I don’t.”

“That’s just rumor.”

“A rumor with mighty big feet. And I don’t trust that other one either. I know what she’s capable of.”

“Vida.”

“You forgot?” Vida’s eyebrows lifted in surprise.

“Nobody knows for sure.”

“Knows what?” asked Romen.

“Some old mess,” said his grandfather.

Vida stood and moved to the refrigerator. “Somebody killed him as sure as I’m sitting here. Wasn’t a thing wrong with that man.” Dessert was canned pineapple in sherbet glasses. Vida set one at each place. Sandler, unimpressed, leaned back. Vida caught his look but decided to let it lie. She worked; he was on a security guard’s hilarious pension. And although he kept the house just fine, she was expected to come home and cook a perfect meal every day.

“What man?” Romen asked.

“Bill Cosey,” replied Sandler. “Used to own a hotel and a lot of other property, including the ground under this house.”

Vida shook her head. “I saw him the day he died. Hale at breakfast; dead at lunch.”

“He had a lot to answer for, Vida.”

“Somebody answered for him: ‘No lunch.’”

“You forgive that old reprobate anything.”

“He paid us good money, Sandler, and taught us, too. Things I never would have known about if I’d kept on living over a swamp in a stilt house. You know what my mother’s hands looked like. Because of Bill Cosey, none of us had to keep doing that kind of work.”

“It wasn’t that bad. I miss it sometimes.”

“Miss what? Slop jars? Snakes?”

“The trees.”

“Oh, shoot.” Vida tossed her spoon into the sherbet glass hard enough to get the clink she wanted.

“Remember the summer storms?” Sandler ignored her. “The air just before—”

“Get up, Romen.” Vida tapped the boy’s shoulder. “Help me with the dishes.”

“I ain’t finished, Gran.”

“Yes you are. Up.”

Romen, forcing air through his lips, pushed back his chair and unfolded himself. He tried to exchange looks with his grandfather, but the old man’s eyes were inward.

“Never seen moonlight like that anywhere else.” Sandler’s voice was low. “Make you want to—” He collected himself. “I’m not saying I would move back.”

“I sure hope not.” Vida scraped the plates loudly. “You’d need gills.”

“Mrs. Cosey said it was a paradise.” Romen reached for a cube of pineapple with his fingers.

Vida slapped his hand. “It was a plantation. And Bill Cosey took us off of it.”

“The ones he wanted.” Sandler spoke to his shoulder.

“I heard that. What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing, Vida. Like you said, the man was a saint.”

“There’s no arguing with you.”

Romen dribbled liquid soap into hot water. His hands felt good sloshing in it, though it stung the bruises on his knuckles. His side hurt more while he stood at the sink, but he felt better listening to his grandparents fussing about the olden days. Less afraid.

The girl did not miss the house, and the man with the Ice-Off was not wrong: the house was graceful, imposing, and its peaked third-story roof did suggest a church. The steps to the porch, slanted and shiny with ice, encouraged caution, for there was no railing. But the girl clicked along the walk and up the steps without hesitation. Seeing no bell, she started to knock, hesitating when she noticed a shaft of light below, to the right of the porch. She went back down the sloping steps, followed the curve marked by half-buried slate, and descended a flight of iron stairs lit by a window. Beyond the window, a door. No wind buffeted her there. The area had the look of what was called a garden apartment by some—by others, a basement one. Pausing at the pane, she saw a seated woman. On the table before her were a colander, newspapers, and a mixing bowl. The girl tapped on the window and smiled when the woman looked up. She rose slowly but once on her feet moved rapidly to the door.

“What is it?” The door opened just wide enough to expose one gray eye.

“I came about the job,” said the girl. A marine odor hovered in the crack.

“Then you’re lost,” said the woman and slammed the door.

The girl banged on it, shouting, “It says One Monarch Street! This is number one!”

There was no answer, so she went back to the window and pecked the glass with the nails of her left hand while her right pressed the newsprint toward the light.

The woman came back to the window, her eyes flat with annoyance as they stared at the girl, then moved from the young face and its pleading smile to the piece of paper. She squinted at it, looked again at the face, then back at the piece of paper. She motioned toward the door and disappeared from the window, but not before a shard of panic glinted in her eyes, then died.

When the girl was inside, the woman offered neither seat nor greeting. She took the advertisement and read. A penciled circle separated the few lines of one help-wanted notice from others above and below.

“Where did you get this?” The woman’s tone was accusatory.

“From the newspaper.”

“I can see that. Which? The Harbor Journal?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“When?”

“Today.”

She handed back the advertisement. “Well. I guess you better sit down.” The snap in her voice loosened.

“Are you Mrs. H. Cosey?”

She gave the girl a look. “If I was, I’d know about that little scrap of paper, wouldn’t I?”

The girl’s laughter was like the abrupt agitation of bells. “Oh, right. Sorry.”

They both sat then and the woman returned to the work of deveining shrimp. Twelve rings, two on three fingers of each hand, snatched light from the ceiling fixture and seemed to elevate her task from drudgery to sorcery.

“You have a name?”

“Yes, ma’am. Junior.”

The woman looked up. “Your daddy’s idea?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Have mercy.”

“You can call me June, if you want.”

“I don’t want. Your daddy give you a last name? Prom, maybe? Or Choir?”

“Viviane,” said Junior. “With an e.”

“An e? You from around here?”

“Used to be. I’ve been away.”

“I never heard tell of any family around here named Viviane with an e or without one.”

“Oh, they’re not from here. Originally.”

“Where then?”

Jacket leather purred as Junior Viviane shrugged her shoulders and reached across the table to the colander. “Up north. Can I help you with that, ma’am?” she asked. “I’m a pretty fair cook.”

“Don’t.” The woman held up a staying hand. “Needs a certain rhythm.”

A bouquet of steam wandered away from water lifting to a boil on the stove. Behind the table was a wall of cupboards, their surfaces as pale and handled as yeast dough. The silence stretching between the two women tightened. Junior Viviane fidgeted, her jacket creaking over the tick of shrimp shells.

“Is Mrs. H. Cosey here, ma’am?”

“She is.”

“May I speak to her, please?”

“Let me see that thing again.” The woman wiped her hands on a dish towel before touching the ad. “‘Highly confidential,’ huh?” She pursed her lips. “I believe that. I sure do,” she said, and dropped the paper with thumb and forefinger, as though depositing a diaper into a soak pail. She wiped her hands again and selected a shrimp. There, just there, beneath the flesh she held in her fingers, crept a dark and tender line. Deft as a jeweler, she removed it.

“Can I see Mrs. Cosey now, please?” Junior sank her chin into her palm, underscoring her question with a smile.

“I guess. Sure. Up those stairs, then some more stairs. All the way to the top.” She motioned toward a flight of stairs leading from an alcove near the stove. Junior stood.

“I don’t suppose you interested in my name?”

Junior turned back, her grin a study in embarrassment and muddle. “Oh, yes, ma’am. I’m sorry. I am. I’m just so nervous.”

“It’s Christine. If you get the ‘highly confidential’ job you’ll need to know it.”

“I hope so. Nice meeting you, Christine. Really. Second floor, you said?”

Her boots were muffled on the stairs.

Christine turned away. She should have said, “No. Third,” but she didn’t. Instead she glanced at the warming light on the rice cooker. Gathering the shrimp shells, she plopped them into the boiling water and adjusted the flame. Returning to the table, she picked up a garlic paw and, enjoying her bedizened hands as usual, peeled two of the cloves. These she diced and left on the cutting board. The old Philco refrigerator murmured and trembled. Christine gave it a reassuring pat before bending to a low cabinet, thinking, What’s she up to now? Must be scared or fixing to make a move. What, though? And how did she manage to get a notice in the paper without my knowing? She selected a silver tureen with a fitted glass bowl, sighing at the stubborn tarnish in the crevices of the C’s on its cover. Like all the carved letters in the house, the double C’s went beyond ornate to illegible. Even on the handle of the spoon in her apron pocket, the initials, once hooked together for life, were hardly a trace. It was tiny, a coffee spoon, but Christine ate every meal she could with it just to hold close the child it was given to, and hold also the pictures it summoned. Scooping peach slices with it from homemade ice cream, helpless in the thrill, never minding the grains of sand blowing over the dessert—the whole picnic lunch for that matter.

Christine soaped and rinsed the glass bowl as her thoughts skittered from beach picnics to Silver Dip, salt-spiced air to Q-tips, and on to the interview being held at that moment in the bedroom of the meanest woman on the coast. While sitting across from the lying Miss Junior-but-you-can-call-me-June, Christine had put her