When the bed was done, I stood beside it. I did not know exactly what I was waiting for, what I hoped I or he would say. I knew I should say something in defense of Mama. If Lenore was here, she would have loudly cursed Mr. Ben the whole time. But he looked at me with a sadness so deep it startled me. I could not say anything to reprimand him. Instead, I stepped forward and hugged him fiercely.

He smelled of fresh-cut grass, up close. I had not expected that. He was still in my arms for a moment, and then he put his own arms around me once, a quick, tight squeeze, the tightest I’d ever known, the air squeezed out of my lungs. And then he let me go.

“I’ll be all right, girl,” he said. “You go on now.”

I was of an age then when I had just left Mama’s bed for one of my own, and even though I wished to comfort her, I did not wish to give up my hard-won independence of a cot to myself, under the eaves. I stood by her examination room door while she sat with her back toward me, bent over her books.

“Mama,” I began.

“Go to bed, Libertie.”

So I did.

I did not see Mr. Ben to Culver’s back room. Mama decided to take him there herself after Lenore came. She said, “You stay here, Libertie. You asked for your education to begin, and so it begins today.”

As Mama walked down the road with Mr. Ben, neither of them speaking or looking at each other, I imagined what secrets I was about to be initiated into. What big-woman ways I was about to learn. What I would be able to chart about hearts and spleens and tongues. But Lenore only turned to me and said, “You can start with the cats in the barn.”

We had a band of stray cats that had lived in the hay there since Mama was a girl. Big nature-raised hooligans with gnarled and matted fur, and sometimes sores on their sides. Whole generations that Mama and Lenore took care of, nursing their battle scars and birthing their litters. They terrified me. Even from far away, I knew them as too rough to be pets.

“Not them,” I said.

Lenore smirked. “Your mama said it’s how you’ll learn to care.”

So I took the bucket that Lenore usually did, and filled it with what she fed the cats—guts and bits from the kitchen, ground up for them. In the dim light of the barn, I could hear them all around me, and soon a few came closer and rubbed up against me. I felt panicked. Not because of their sharp teeth or their hissing, but because of their need. They wanted so much from me. The smell of their food made me ill, not because it was putrefying but because of how much it made them want me, made them mimic the action of love to get it, swirling around me, their softness hiding a deep, yawning hunger inside of them, just below their skin. I could feel it humming when they got too close. Their need was monstrous.