She offered him one of the butter cookies she’d brought with her. She’d made a huge batch of them the evening before and dropped a tin of them off at Mayor Sykes’s office on her way to the warehouse this morning. Martin declined the offer in favor of his pipe.

“So,” he said, pulling one of the chairs out from under the table and sitting down as if she’d invited him to stay. “I saw your sketch hanging in the post office.”

So he’d already seen it. “And…?” She stood a distance away, her arms folded across her chest.

He nodded. “Quite impressive for someone your age.”

“Only for someone my age?” She attempted a genuine smile, but it felt forced.

“Perhaps you’re trying to please too many people by having such a conglomeration of ideas.”

That had been her fear as well, but she wasn’t about to tell him that. “The Section approved it and you know they can be notoriously difficult.”

“Also, notoriously wrong at times.” Was he teasing her or deadly serious? She couldn’t tell.

“What would you have painted?” she asked.

He looked into the distance as if imagining his mural. “I left people out of my sketch altogether,” he said. “I had more of an aerial scene. Broad Street with all the shops leading down to the waterfront, and in the distance, farmland that stretched on forever.” He sounded a bit dreamy, describing it.

“That would have been a wise choice,” she said. “Much simpler than what I’m attempting to do, throwing all those challenging-to-paint human beings into my mural.”

He gave her a sharp look, then laughed. “All right, Miss Dale, I see you can hold your own.”

Suddenly, the warehouse door opened and in walked a young colored man, his hair and coat dusted with snow. He carried a sketchbook beneath his arm, and he grinned at Anna. “I’m Jesse, ma’am,” he said. “Miss Furman sent me here.”

It took her a moment to understand. “I thought Miss Furman was sending one of her students,” she said. “An eleventh-grader.”

“I am an eleventh-grader,” he said.

He must have stayed back two or three years at least, Anna thought. “How old are you?” she asked.

“Seventeen.”

He was only seventeen? He was definitely more man than child, although she thought she detected a gentle innocence in his round doe eyes.

“You’re not supposed to arrive until after school,” she said.

“I don’t need to go to my last two classes,” he said, in what she guessed was a lie.

He glanced from her to Martin and back again, and Anna wondered if he thought he’d walked in on a romantic liaison by arriving early.

“Mr. Drapple was helping me with the car … with the paper.” She pointed toward the cartoon. “He was just leaving.”