“I’m going to want my blue dress washed this week,” Miss Martha tells me, looking at herself in the mirror. “And the hem needs mending. Do you think Bessie can still do it?”

I purse my lips and work through a tangle. “Don’t know,” I say. “She makes a lot of mistakes these days. If you ask me, she uses being blind as an excuse to be spiteful.” Can’t nobody tell me she thought she was just adding salt tonight. She knows what she did.

“Then give it to Annie to mend, I suppose,” Miss Martha says.

She’s watching me in the reflecting glass, so I keep my face quiet, but I want to roll my eyes at her and shake my head. Annie’s likely to steal half the pearls from the dress and say they fell off in the grass.

“Don’t you worry,” I say. “I’ll give it to Willa. She’s better with the needle.”

I move round her head dragging the brush down her back. I let the bristles scrape lightly across her scalp the way she likes it. She closes her eyes and her pulled-up-tight posture softens as she leans back into the chair. I give her a few minutes to relax into me fussing with her hair, and, when I speak, I use the bedtime voice that used to ease her right off to sleep when she was little.

“I been thinking,” I say, low and gentle.

“Yes.” The muscles in her face relax.

“You got Sarah here working at the house now. And you still got Annie and Willa. And Bessie’s been trying to get Clover and Samson and Callie May brought up from the fields.”

“You know your Master won’t let bucks work in the house. Not even Bessie’s own boys. Clover and Samson will stay in the fields.” She sighs. “And as for Callie May, we don’t need her in the house. She’s more use in the field.”

I bite my lip and gather my words, while I run the brush across her head. “Seems to me,” I go on, “if I weren’t around, there’s enough folks here to keep the house running just fine.”

“But you are around.” She pins me with her eyes and raises her eyebrows. As well as I know her, she knows me too. “What’s on your mind, Maple?”

“I been thinking about my momma, and about my husband, Freddy, and especially about my Rose.”

“I’m sure they’re all fine,” she says. “We would have heard if they weren’t.”

“I been thinking, now that you’re set up here at Jubilee, I could go back home. To your daddy’s place.”

She settles back in the chair. “I suppose you could visit for a spell.”

The sound of the scrape of the brush against her hair fills the room.

I gather my nerves and I say what I need to say, “I was thinking I might live there again.”

“Live there?”

“Well, I was thinking of how Master never does like to break up a family, and, well, we’re a family. I thought he might let me go back and be with them.”