“Only what I learned these past weeks. I gather the husband was a charming rogue. He did all right in the beginning, so it took her a while to discover his crooked streak. But before long, Viola was doing all the work and he was spending all the money. He drank it up or gambled it away. After a while, she started drinking to help herself deal with his drinking. It’s an old story. Viola gained weight, started smoking, got depressed. She aged fast. The North could be as cruel as the South to blacks in those days. More cruel, in some ways. Things went steadily downhill. The husband looked elsewhere for sex. He’d probably been cheating on her from the start, Viola said.”

Dad shakes his head with a mixture of sadness and incomprehension. “I think it hurt Viola’s pride when she lost her looks. She was never vain, but I don’t care how selfless a woman is, she still cares about her looks. And Viola had been a beauty. I think between the drinking, the no-’count husband, and working hard to raise her son, she just wore herself out.”

“I sure hate to hear that. What I remember of Viola is like a dream. In my mind she looks like a TV star.”

Dad smiles wistfully. “I don’t think anybody who ever knew her down here would believe her fate. That’s why she never came home. Viola wanted people to remember her as she had been. And they did. She only worked here for eight years, but people still ask about her thirty-seven years later. She had a life force that made you want to be close to her. One lady told me that a smile from Viola Turner could warm you up on a cold day. She could give a child a shot without a tear being shed, and that was something in the days of screw-on needles you had to sand the burrs off of.”

I can’t help but laugh. “You’re right.”

Dad starts to smile, but the expression dies a-borning. “Penn … if you’d seen Viola in her sickbed yesterday, you’d have cried. I did, after the first time I saw her. Time is a terrible thing. And lung cancer’s worse.”

“I did see her,” I confess, wondering at the irony of the smoke filling this office.

Dad blinks like an old man awakened from an accidental nap. “You what? What do you mean?”

“Today I saw a video recording of the last minute of Viola’s life.”

His eyes narrow with suspicion. “What are you talking about?”