I didn’t want to smile because I wanted the conversation to remain serious. I smiled anyway. “I appreciate hearing that. I hope you didn’t marry me just for my good looks.”

“I didn’t. But having a woman with your looks is sure enough easier to deal with than them baboons some men got. I’m glad I ain’t Odell. I feel sorry for him. If I had to snuggle up in bed with a frump like Joyce every night, I’d become a monk.”

“Well, Odell ain’t stuck with just Joyce every night. He got Betty Jean to fall back on. And she is almost as pretty as me. So you ain’t got to feel sorry for him.” I laughed. Then I got serious again. “Milton, do you regret moving to this neighborhood? We been living over here for five months now. Sometimes I don’t feel like I belong in such a nice house with pecan trees in the front and backyard, and that cute picket fence. We ain’t got much in common with these smug folks over here, and we the only bootleggers operating in this part of town. Something tells me that this arrest thing will make some of our neighbors start avoiding us.”

Milton’s mouth dropped open and he eyeballed me like I’d sprouted a goatee. “What? You was just as hyped up as I was about moving away from that run-down neighborhood on the lower south side. You was itching to live among the colored doctors and lawyers and other uptown colored folks over here. And we done made some good friends over here. Like Dr. Patterson down the street. He invited us to have Thanksgiving supper with him and his family, remember?”

“He might not want us to come now,” I whined. “We jailbirds.”

“We was jailbirds when we moved here. And the way Joyce runs her mouth, I’m sure she done told everybody in the vicinity. Anyway, we ain’t never tried to keep our past a secret. I done lost count of how many times I overheard Willie Frank mention to some of our guests who live in this neighborhood, that me and him met in prison. Them same folks still come to our house.”

“Yeah, that’s right. And to think that somebody tried to have us sent back to prison. It’s . . . it’s unspeakable. I never thought we’d be victims in such a messy situation. No wonder I’m feeling a little uncertain about our future.”

“Yvonne, you can stop feeling uncertain about anything. Me and you ain’t victims, we survivors. As far as the devil that set us up, we ain’t going to stop until we find out who done it. By the time we get through with them, they’ll wish they’d never been born.”

* * *