After the funeral we had lunch at a cafeteria in Buckhead. Then we went back to Aunt Gaye’s apartment and I collected my suitcases and Mrs. Martin made me a little supper of peanut butter sandwiches and carrot sticks and a boiled egg. She packed it in a tiny hatbox she found on a shelf. A very small hatbox that must have contained an elf’s hat or a veil for church. All the way to Tuscaloosa from Atlanta, as the DC-8 bumped up and down through the clouds, I would look at the little box beside me and shudder, thinking of the crowded bedroom and the brooding presence of all those clothes. Occasionally I thought of what Malcolm and I had done on the bed, of the deep cavernous adventure. “Do it harder,” he kept saying. “Think about it. Try.” Where had he learned how to do it? I wondered. How did he know how to tell me what to do?

Once I slept for a while and when I woke, sweating and surprised, jolting up and down with the plane, I thought perhaps I had been doing it in my sleep. “Do you love me?” I had asked him at the airport. “Are you sure you love me?”

“Sure. Sure I do.”

“When can I see you again?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what’s going to happen.” We were standing with our backs against the rickety uprights that supported the canvas roof of the airport walkway. Minx and Henry were a few feet away, talking to the ticket agent.

‘I’m coming to Emory to summer school,” I said. “I really mean it.”

“I’ll be here.” He pulled my body into his. Fire, a black singer would later call it, and I would know what she meant. This was love, wasn’t it? Surely this was love.

“I hope we’ll see you again soon,” Minx said, coming to stand beside me. “The next time you’re in Atlanta, come and stay with us. You bring her to us, Malcolm. And make it soon. Don’t let this darling girl get away from you.”

“I won’t.” He smiled a dazzling happy smile. Unless he was drinking, he was stingy with smiles. I decided he was relieved that I was leaving.

“Come on,” Henry said. “He wants your ticket now.” I kissed them all goodbye and walked out onto the runway. When I was almost to the plane, I turned and waved to them again. “Goodbye,” I called. “Goodbye again. I’m going to miss you.”

“Come back to us,” Minx called out. She jumped up and down and waved her hands like a signal man on an aircraft carrier.

“Come back immediately,” Henry screamed. “Don’t stay away.”