“Everything’s about money. You can’t live on right or wrong. They’re starry-eyed ideals that don’t exist here. Look around, people are destitute. Dignity doesn’t keep them warm on the streets. You have to have something in your pocket.”

“You know what I have in my pocket,” he flirted.

I licked the smile off my lips and laid my head on his lap, loving the way he played with my hair. With Rosie around so often, there hadn’t been enough moments like those, where we could be together without the weight of the world sitting on our shoulders. I looked forward to times I knew the chorus moll would be working in the alley, hating that I had to steal moments that had been so easily accessed before.

“Tell me one of your stories, Huckleberry,” I urged, wanting a moment away from the bushwa to listen to Cal, hanging onto his every word as he filled in the missing moments in his life.

“Why do you care about my silly stories?” he laughed, pretending to be modest when I knew he was anything but.

“You know why” I answered, not willing to say more.

“I’ve told you about my time in New Orleans, haven’t I?”

“Only that you went there before you came here.”

I sat up only for Cal to pull me down so our heads were lying on his pillow, faces turned toward each other. His arms were long, but he managed to hold me close, making me pliant in his embrace. It had taken a while for acts of affection to feel comfortable, as if a lifetime of not being touched had made my body rigid, and as it loosened, it allowed me to finally take a new form. His.

“I got there in August of 1928, a year after the flood.”

“How was that?”

“Everything was a mess,” Cal replied, tracing his finger pad over my jawbone. “Most of the black folks who had been in refugee camps in the lowlands had either committed to making their lives there or had started to move north.”

“So, who did you meet?” I asked, knowing his stories always centered upon a character who wasn’t him.

“André LeBas.”

I despised the dreamy look he had in his eyes as the creole name rolled off his tongue. Had Cal touched him the way he touched me? Had he made André feel like his was the only face he sought to memorize?

Cal continued to speak, which assured me I’d done an adequate job of concealing my jealousy. “He’d been in a camp for six months before he got to New Orleans. The things he told me about the camp.” Cal shook his head as though he was recalling a memory he’d never had. “They didn’t have food or clean water.”

“You won’t either if you mess things up with Abe.”