“That’s where my daddy is,” I said. “Mama’s sister, too. They’re dead like your Daisy. Like you were. ’Cept Mama couldn’t bring them back. She did that for you, though.”

He looked at me from the corner of his eye and smiled slightly. “They all in there, then?” he said.

“Yeah.” I thought about it for a minute. “Not all of ’em, though. Mama’s sister’s hair, it lives in the glass jar in the parlor. But all of my daddy’s in there.”

Mr. Ben nodded. He was quiet for a moment, and then he spit in disgust on the ground. “I don’t even know Daisy’s resting place.”

He limped to the middle of the crossroads, turning first in one direction, then the other. He looked up above him again, at the sky. Then he said, “Let’s go back to your mother’s.” And so we did.

He allowed me, though, the kindness of slipping my hand in his as we walked back home.

Dinner was eaten in near silence. Mr. Ben seemed to be thinking still of our trip to town, and Mama, she ate not for pleasure but for utility. She often said that if it was not for Lenore, I would not know good cookery at all. She seemed to notice that there was a sadness around Mr. Ben, because she said, at the end of a meal where the sole talk was between our tin spoons scraping our plates, “Is everything all right, then?”

He looked up at her, hard, for a minute. So hard Mama startled.

Then he looked back down at his plate and said, “Yes, ma’am.”

It was my job to clear the table, to take everything to the basin of water Lenore always left, her last duty before the end of the day. So I did not hear how it started between them, only how it ended.

I had taken our plates and come back for the pitcher when I saw Mr. Ben by the parlor mantelpiece, running his hand along it. Mama was still at the table. She had taken out her accounting ledger for the day. She was back in the world of her mind.

Mr. Ben ran his fingers along the family Bible that sat there, then over the little mirror in a gold frame that Mama displayed and the bowl where Lenore put cut blossoms from the tulip tree outside. He skipped over the jar with the braids in it. His fingers next ran over a pile of newsprint.

“What’s this?” he said.

Mama glanced up over the greasy spectacles on her nose, narrowed her eyes. “Ah, that? That is our newspaper. They print it once a month. It has lots for sale, and news of the church. And here …” Mama got up to stand beside Mr. Ben.

“I can’t cipher,” he said.

“Of course,” Mama said. “But, you see, there’s a primer in the back.”