DeWitt was quiet, actually engrossed in some paperback novel with a torn-off cover, which he wanted to read rather than talk to me. That was fine; I was in a hurry. I did ask him what the book was about.

“You ain’t old enough to know,” he said.

Early in the afternoon, I pull up in front of Marvelous’s three-plex, note that her dirt yard has been raked carefully and the porch swept, as usual. “I am blessed,” she tells me all the time, sitting in her tiny, third-floor walk-up. The place is spotless on the inside, if falling apart—literally—on the outside. She has a gigantic velvet Elvis painting on the wall above her reading chair, red plastic flowers in a jelly glass on the kitchen table. Her bathroom has a matching pink rug, toilet seat, and tank cover. On her bedroom wall are pictures of her long-dead husband, her children and grandchildren. The floors gleam; she has window boxes filled with purple-and-white petunias. She has an old, floor-model radio and a television that doesn’t much come in. She had the components for a very nice VCR stacked up on her floor one day, but gone the next. I didn’t ask. I knew. Her thirty-year-old son, Rodney, whose ways of making a living are not exactly by the book.

I have never heard Marvelous rail against all she must endure: prejudice, poverty, illness. The nastiest I’ve seen her is one day when she was talking about the rich people for whom she used to clean. “Lord, they be complaining,” she said. “Sitting there in the lap of luxury and whining from the time they step out of bed ’til they step back in it. Sometimes I want to say something to them, say, ‘Here now, you know what? You missing something in your soul, be plain as day you missing something bad.’ But they don’t listen to me. They don’t see me. They say (and here she made her voice high and affected), ‘Oh, Marvelous, how you get that toilet to shine so!’ Like they couldn’t figure that out they own self. Like they that stupid. And like I should be proud my talent in life is cleaning toilets! I’ll tell you why they walk around looking at my work before I go, singing my praises. They looking to see did I take something.”

She has affixed her colostomy bag perfectly today, as she has the last two times; really, there is nothing for me to do for her anymore. She understands everything; she knows who to call for help if she runs into problems.