Darlene had put on the pair of man’s felt slippers left in the kitchen—the only memento of a father whose whereabouts had been unknown—and shuffled into the kitchen to heat a black coal stove. She had rewarmed a standing cauldron of water and dipped a rough rag in it before she ran it over her bucked and jagged teeth. She would then soak the same rag with castile soap. She always dipped it back into the pot to rinse. She had stood naked in the middle of the room, glowing in the brilliant Southern sun, and vigorously scrubbed her underarms and privates. Careful not to infect the water her mother and sisters would use behind her, she would dip a brand-new torn rag in the pot to rinse before throwing them all in a pile to be washed. She had then slipped a shift over her head and started another pot for German Mills oats. She had roasted cured bacon fat directly over the flame. Minutes after both aromas started drifting through the hut and out of windows, other neighbors’ lamps were lit and the beds began to creak in the other room. She had left the food heaped on one stoneware plate on top of the stove and patted down her hair. She had then grabbed a knapsack full of coins, oatmeal cookies, apples, and a school ledger with the alphabet notes from what her sisters were learning in school. She hadn’t locked the door behind her when she left for her stocking and cleaning job at Miss Mailley’s General Store. She had forgotten the hushed chatter of her mother and several other women from African Episcopal Holy Communion Church as they had congregated the night before at her kitchen table, a popular meeting spot for gossip after the women retired from their jobs at the nearby sugar cane refinery or sweet potato fields, not because they especially liked her mother but mostly because she had two rooms. Darlene hadn’t worried about the women’s whispered words, hushed whenever the girls came near, telling of the search for a robber on the loose, because something else was on her mind.