But I became her fool all over again. Gladly. Isn’t it amazing? How so little a thing can change your whole view of things? No longer was Durham grey, and no longer did the prospect of growing old fill me with dread. I saved enough to quit teaching and went to seminary full-time to complete my third year. Anne and I were married in Tims Creek, a place she fell in love with and insisted she must live in, much to her parents’ active disdain. Her father was a doctor, transplanted from Oklahoma; her mother, who could easily have passed for white, was an art historian who worked as an assistant curator for a small university museum. She prided herself on being able to trace her lineage back to Thomas Jefferson, something Anne abhorred. Her parents did not approve of me. I was too dark, too poor, not Episcopalian, not traveled, not right—Anne loved it. And my family loved Anne, and was doubly proud that I had snared such an attractive fish, though I suspect they doubted she would be happy living in Tims Creek. They were prouder still the day I was ordained at First Baptist.

There was yet another two years in Durham as I went back to graduate school for my masters in education—ministers of small Southern churches don’t earn a real salary, and it was going to be necessary for me to have another, complementary profession.

Yet through all the success I don’t think there was ever a moment I felt I knew Anne, and I was always vexed by her self-contained ease.

Then one day I was not feeling at all well and left school early. It was about three o’clock in the afternoon, the middle of spring, cars and trucks honking horns, students from the universities milling around town. I was as innocent as a lamb, as unsuspecting—though underneath my consciousness I probably did suspect. I walked into the house, expecting Anne to be out in the field, but there were signs that she was home. There was a jacket across a chair in the kitchen, a worn, dusty denim jacket. I could picture the man it belonged to, tall, big, maybe a slight pot belly. A worker, maybe a loader at the tobacco factory, or maybe a truck driver. I still don’t know, nor do I truly care, who he was. Nor do I know whether I did the right thing, really. “The right thing.” As if there is a right or a wrong when you are placed in such a situation.