She didn’t wait. She said, “You see a little nigger girl wanting to eat up your biscuit, your bacon, whatever you got? You see me thinking my taking care of you once overnight is something I can trade for lots more than that? Or maybe even just nigger pussy ready for you to say the right words, do the right thing? That what you see, Norman?” And she was reared back away from him now, sitting still on the bench, upright as if at a great distance, her back arched like a drawn bow, eyes burning wide open as her soul welled up but not at all ready to pour out without something back from him. He watched his hands turning one over the other, the fingers lacing and relacing until he realized she was watching him do this. He slid around and lifted his right leg over the bench so he sat spraddle-legged facing her front on. With his face collapsed in sheer terror, he said to her, “Leah. All I see is the most lovely girl I’ve ever seen.”

She stood off the bench away from him and said, “I told you the truth, Norman. I told you the truth. But you lying to me if that’s all you see.”

And without even thinking about it he said, “What I see is the most lovely girl and one fat wide world of trouble. Trouble for both of us. That’s what I see.”

And now she stepped back over the bench to face him and said, “You got that right. You got that just exactly right.” He reached and took one of her hands and sat looking down at their hands lying one into the other, the small slip of warmth between his fingers, her life lying up against his, and still not looking at her he said, “Don’t you ever talk that way to me again Leah.”

“What way?” Her voice low, already knowing, needing to ask, needing him to tell her.

So he said, “That nigger-this nigger-that business.”

“White men talk any way they want to a colored girl.”

“Am I white men to you then?”

She reached her free hand and took his other hand and put it against her breastbone just below her throat and told him, “My daddy’s a white man, Norman.”

“I figured something like that,” he said; in truth he hadn’t thought that far. So again without thinking he said, “He doesn’t talk that way does he?” His hand warming to the heat of her, his brain on the buttons down her dress-front.

She tilted her chin to look at him. “My daddy has never even said my name to me.” Her voice tight with disgust, venom, a loathing that was distinct and almost covered all what sadness she had but that he knew was there, knew it the same way she believed his soul to be gentle. He scooted toward her on the bench and she brought her knees in tight to the bench to let him come close and he put his arms around her and she laid her head against him and he sat there, holding her like that.