“Here.” I looked over at the crowd of parishioners. My mother stood in the middle, searching for me, I knew. “Kneel down.”

He sat at my feet while I peeled each papery flower off the page and stuck them, carefully, into the band of his hat.

The church bell rang. The crowd began to move into the chapel. I had to take my place at my mother’s side.

“Black Gal, your penny,” he called.

“You can keep it,” I said, and hurried toward the church.

I had expected him to follow me and join his sister in service, but he didn’t. As I rushed to the doors, I looked back to the graveyard. Ben sat on the ground in the green and brown, his head still low. As the door swung shut, I swore I saw, through a flash in the trees, the figure of a woman rushing toward him, the long trail of her pink silk skirt fluttering in her haste. The church door closed, I walked to my pew, and when I craned my head to try and see him out the window, no one was there. I thought it must have been a shadow, that my pity for Ben Daisy had led me to yearn to see what he did, to bring the dead woman back for him and me—as if that would have healed anything at all.

During the service, I kept seeing that penny in Ben Daisy’s hand, and I thought about the woman who he’d claimed had come to him at night, who wore the rings of other lovers on her fingers, who could not even manage to be faithful as a spirit. Was this what caring for another did? Resurrect them, even in death, to only become your worst fears? Did Ben Daisy suffer from too much care? Mama thought he did not have enough of it. But it seemed to me as though Ben Daisy had too much.

In the following weeks, he did not go to work with the other men anymore. He did not leave his bed in the room he shared with Miss Hannah. He even stopped saying that name. He became a ghost. When Mama tried to talk to Miss Hannah about it, she would only shake her head and say, “I don’t know, Miss Doctor,” before walking away.

One Saturday night, Pete Back Back came to Mama’s door. He would not sit in her big leather chair, only stood in the middle of her examination room.

“Ben finally left his bed last night. Agreed to have a tipple with me,” Pete said. “We drunk from Friday night into this morning. Culver threw us out at dawn. Said we was unruly. So we walked to the waterfront downtown.