That gentles him some and he comes around the wood table to stand closer. He reaches out and runs his fingers along the side of my face and cups my cheek. “You look exactly the same,” he says.

I don’t. I’m heavier and I droop, but I still look just like him.

“You haven’t changed either,” I say, because even though he’s fatter and redder and balder, with wrinkles spreading like lice, he still forgets and remembers and forgets who I am to him.

Miss Martha comes in and he jerks his hand away from my face like touching hot coals.

“Well?” she says. “Are you satisfied enough now to be civil and take tea with your daughter?” He turns to her and she blushes when she reads the uneasy surprise in his face. She clears her throat. “Maple, make my father and me some tea please and bring it to the sitting room.”

He lets her take his arm and she leads him out. At the door he pauses. “If you hear something,” he says, “I trust you’ll tell me.”

I watch the two of them walk on, arm in arm, and hardly notice the knot in my chest.

I take two stout breaths to clear my head. Master Jeremiah’s here at Jubilee, which means Momma must be here too. That man never went nowhere without dragging her along, even when his wife was alive and gave him hell for it.

I make the tea, but instead of bringing it straight in to them, I first dart upstairs to where I figure Momma’ll be unpacking his trunk.

When I hurry into the room, Kitty’s there from the old plantation, a slave girl grown into a woman. She’s wearing a deep blue dress of raw silk with a high ruffled collar, a dress as fine as anything Miss Martha owns. Playing at being the missus in her fancy clothes. And there’s me, carrying tea, looking like I’ve come to serve her.

“Where’s my momma?” I say. She’s already got me feeling prickly.

She goes clear across the room and says, “Hello, Maple,” right out the window, like she got a pet bird out there with my name.

Me and Kitty weren’t never friends, but we wasn’t enemies. And now here she go, acting like she’s too good for me.

“You trying not to talk to me?” I ask.

She don’t answer. Don’t turn around. Don’t nothing.

“I done something to you?”

She shakes her head at her make-believe bird. She must know something about Freddy, but what I want to know right now is why she’s here and not Momma. I have a feeling like ice under my skin.

“Did something happen to my momma?” I hold my breath waiting to hear.

She looks at me finally and its pity in her eyes.

I set down the tea on the dresser and now it’s me facing the wall, not looking at her. My throat closes up and my eyes sting. “Did she pass away?” I ask. I blink hard three times before I can look at her.