After everyone got back to their own lives and she got back to work at the urgings of a missus who desperately needed her, she was relieved to have at least her son and daughter to cling to at night. She avoided her daughter’s question of “Where’s Daddy?” and began thinking of how she would explain things to them both, one day not today. Often and in panic, she wondered if a man had ever been there. She walked into the bathroom and it smelled like a woman. In it were her feminine things—her powders that smelled like spring, lotions and tonics with floral and fruity aromas, the things that made him fall in love with her. Decorative soaps were lined up perfectly for the guests who had stopped coming. Her bedroom held the softness of a woman. Plush pillows and throws rose above the height of the king-size mattress, completing the already perfect picture like the full breasts of a new mother. The wind blew lace curtains inward and made them dance like the hair of a girl running in autumn. Housedresses with Tawana’s shape carved into them were draped across the back of the vanity chair, over the dresser mirror, across the bed like a bride waiting to be taken. The sun shining through the bedroom window heated the perfumes on the vanity and her smell came alive there too. Aunt Jemima smiled behind cabinet doors. The Bessie Smith album cover she used as a dustpan was propped against the pantry. The loose ceiling fan that whirled constantly throughout the poorly ventilated room sounded like a despairing mother’s quiet lullaby. Tawana’s breast pump dangled from the top of the refrigerator, ready for duty when her baby was not. Inside the refrigerator were bottles of her milk, lined up by hour so she always used the oldest one first. In the corner were the size-seven holed-up house shoes that she slipped on to throw the garbage over the window ledge and into the alley outside. Always, yellow gloves hung over the faucet; no man would ever worry to preserve the softness of his hands.