He looked at her, a level gaze. Then took his pipe up, filled it and scratched a match against his bootsole. Worked at the pipe a moment to get it going and then said, “No, I don’t expect I do. I asked those questions because I want to know as much as I can about what was around your story before you tell it. Do you understand that?”

She shrugged. “None of it’s going to change anything.”

“Nothing that matters.”

“Nothing that matters.”

“All right. Tell me then.”

“On one condition.”

“What’s that?”

“You tell me how what I’ve got to say fits with what you know. I heard you talking to Pru the other night. And I knew some of that before. But some of it, some of all what I know, doesn’t square with things I heard you talking to her about.”

“I won’t promise anything. Seems to me perhaps you spend too much time overhearing other people.”

She shrugged. “There’s nothing you can protect me from.”

He drew on the pipe and clouded the room. He nodded. “No,” he said. “I guess there’s not.”

She said, “I don’t trust my memory to repeat her word by word. And it would get all jumbled up, even more than it was. So all I’ve got is what remained with me and what I’ve made of it. It’s the best I can do. But I’ve got a pretty good memory.”

“Memory’s what you make of it.”

“I wish,” she said, “for once you’d be quiet.”

He nodded and laid his pipe in the thick cast brass tray he kept for it on the side of the desktop. They both sat silent a time. From up the stairs came the thin sounds of Prudence putting Jamie to bed, going to bed herself. They had not come to speak goodnight, even at the door. Abby did not confuse this with respect, for privacy or any other thing. Norman put his thumbs under his braces and studied the floorboards. After a while she knew he was done, was now truly waiting for her.

“It was two of them she was talking to. That’s what confuses me. Because with both it was argument, like I said. But the tone was different. Like the one she was adamant with, clear with hatred, and the other almost as if cajoling. Or pleading. That’s a better word. As if explaining herself away, some guilt. I felt she was talking about the same thing, something that happened. Something bad it was, too. And I felt she was talking to the one person it happened to and the other that caused it to happen to the first one. All right? I felt like she was speaking to a dead person and one still alive.”

“Yes.” Norman interrupted. “The dead person would be her half brother, a white man. The other I guess would be her mother. Your grandmother.”

Abby shook her head. “I don’t believe so. I think that’s wrong.”