The end of the summer after my junior year, Lillian rented the top floor of a house on a street my grandparents thought was too dangerous and didn’t like to visit. Next door was Mrs. Bauer, an ancient white lady who, as far as I could tell, never went past her front porch; and downstairs from us were the Osbournes, a black family with a baby and three kids in elementary school. Sandra, Shirley, and Lionel Jr. were always well dressed, their shirts and dresses ironed, their hair perfect, following their mother in a careful line each morning as she walked them to school, Lionel Jr. pulling a stuffed dog behind him on a string. The week we moved in, Mrs. Osbourne came to our door with a sweet-potato pie. My mother returned the tin clean, with the photo of Lionel Jr. After that, those kids weren’t shy with us anymore. Our side of the neighborhood was shabbier than my grandparents’, but birds built nests in the tree outside my window, and I could smoke. The traffic from I-490 was far enough away to sound like the ocean, and the houses that mysteriously burned down after their owners moved to the suburbs were mostly on the other side of the highway.

A few weeks after we moved, a postcard was waiting for me on Grandma’s end table when Lillian and I came for Sunday dinner. On the front was an announcement for a Chambers Brothers show, and on the back was: Dear Jane, Guess what? We’re moving to Liberia! Wish me luck. I’ll miss you. Peace, Kaja. According to my grandparents’ Compton’s Pictured Encyclopedia, Liberia was “an independent Negro republic on the west coast of Africa.” I tried to convince myself that the postcard was a good sign; if Kaja wrote once, she’d write again. She’d have to: the postcard didn’t include a Liberian address.

When Lillian started going to the coffeehouse in her spare time, I half wondered if I was going to wake up one morning to Sam serving me chamomile in my own kitchen, but that kind of thinking wasn’t very serious. Any time that Lillian was spending with Sam in the dark wasn’t happening in a bedroom. I’d liked Sam and his café when they’d been personal discoveries, but learning that I’d been named for the guy was enough to make me steer clear until my mother’s show there my senior year.