“Rusty.”

“Yes, Rusty. Your husband.” His voice was robotic.

“Hey.”

“Where are you?”

“Montgomery.”

“What the hell are you doing in Montgomery? Tell me it’s because you’re on your way home.”

“No, I’m here looking up some information about Mother. I’m at the Civil Rights Memorial. I can’t believe we’ve never come here. It’s just beautiful. I wanted to see what I could find maybe in the library or—”

“Oh, God, Ellie, you’ve become completely obsessed, haven’t you?”

“What?”

Hutch was walking toward me, holding out my lipstick in triumph. He bowed and handed it to me. “Thanks,” I mouthed, and pointed to the phone.

“Okay,” Rusty said in exhale. “I used the wrong word. You’re not obsessed, but do you really think you needed to go look up something you already know?”

“I wanted to find a picture or article or something.”

“Why?”

“For the exhibition.” I started stuffing things back into my purse, avoiding Hutch’s eyes.

“You’re with him, aren’t you?”

“Who?”

“Your old idiot boyfriend. I can’t even remember his name. Huck Finn or some southern shit like that.”

I looked to Hutch as Rusty’s words crashed down on me like hail: cold and harsh. I shivered before I answered. “Yes, Hutch is here.”

Hutch turned away at this and walked toward the memorial, standing with his back to me.

“Seriously?”

“Rusty, please stop it. Why did you call? Surely not to yell at me about doing research.”

“I called because I miss you. Because I love you. Because I want you to come home. But obviously I’m an asshole.” There was a click and then silence. And my only thought, oddly, was that with cell phones the recipient of a slammed phone never knew it was slammed. It’s hard to slam shut a keypad.

I walked to Hutch and touched his back. He turned. “I’m sorry if this is causing problems for you,” he said.

“This”—I swept my hand across the memorial and around our bodies—“is not what caused the problems. Come on, I’m hungry … .”

He nodded. “I know just where to go.”

After lunch at a barbecue joint I would never have found with GPS or on any map I owned, I settled back into Hutch’s passenger seat and groaned. “Okay, I usually don’t eat that much in two days, much less one sitting.”

“We still have a lot of work to do. I needed to fortify you for the rest of the day. Bus station first.”