Harry smiled and raised his glass. “Samuel, you’ve got to find your place.”

“I’m here, aren’t I?”

“That’s not what I mean. You have to make this place your own. Or you have to go. There’s no third choice.”

“Harry, if I knew how to do that…”

“Where were you brought up?”

“Philadelphia.”

“That doesn’t tell me anything.”

“A gritty little tenement on the Schuylkill River. My father was a riveter, fell off a scaffold and broke his back. He hung on for a couple of years. I sold newspapers on the corner, that’s how I got started. Then a printer took me on as his apprentice. From there to the compositing room of a newspaper. Quit before I went deaf.”

“So you’ve worked your way up.”

“You could say that. I was a scholarship boy at Penn—only lasted two years. Otherwise, I pay as I go.”

“And you couldn’t wait to leave your life behind.”

“Right. And sometimes it couldn’t wait to leave me behind.”

Harry sipped his drink and nodded. “But don’t you ever miss it? Don’t you ever want to go back where you come from?”

Sam thought about that. He tried to recall a single image from childhood, a single smell or taste. The touch of his mother’s hand at bedtime, tucking the covers around his shoulders while he pretended to be asleep. But he didn’t really remember that. He was cheating—making up a memory. She might have done exactly that, and the room might have been sweet with her rose water and the scent of baking rolls still in her apron and in her hair. Her voice might have been soft and husky, her lips dry and cool as they brushed across his cheek.

But really, he couldn’t remember. The room was just a room. His mother, dead now for years, was just a pretty, shy face in a frame, too young ever to have been the dour woman he knew. Philadelphia was a name on the map, an indistinct geometry of dark, square buildings against a gray sky. The details were blurred. The drinking must have wiped it all out, he figured. He had never understood, before today, the extent of what he had lost. He had drunk to forget—that old joke.

“No,” Sam said. “I’m here now. I don’t ever want to go back.”

“Are you, Sam?” Harry asked sadly. “Are you really here with us now?”

Chapter Fifteen

In Peru or Nicaragua or Paris we should call this revolution. It is no less revolution in North Carolina.

C H A P T E R   F I F T E E N

Wednesday, November 9