“I’ll get it back for you.”

“No!” She shook her head. “Ma wouldn’t want that ring in this place, but you can get it for Pa.” She thought for a second, then smiled wanly. “He loved my ma, you know, he really did.”

“I know. I saw him at her grave.”

“Course you did.” She took a crystallized cherry and bit it in half, then tucked her legs up onto the chair. “So why did you call yourself a preacherman? I often wondered about that.”

So Starbuck told her about Boston and the Reverend Elial Starbuck and the big dark brooding house on Walnut Street that always seemed filled with the dangerous silences of parental anger and the smell of wax and wood oil and Bibles and coal smoke. Darkness fell over Richmond, but neither Starbuck nor Sally moved to light a candle, instead they talked of childhood and of broken dreams and how love always seemed to trickle through the fingers when you thought you had a grasp of it.

“It was when Ma died that everything went wrong for me,” Sally said, then she gave a long sigh and turned in the darkness to look at Starbuck. “So you reckon you’ll stay here? In the South?”

“I don’t know. I think so.”

“Why?”

“To be near you?” He said it easily, like a friend, and she laughed to hear it. Starbuck leaned forward, his elbows propped on his long legs and wondered about the real truth of his answer. “I don’t know what I shall do,” he said softly. “I know I’m not going to be a preacher now, and I don’t really know what else I can be. I could be a schoolteacher, I guess, but I’m not really sure I want to do that. I’m no good at business, at least I don’t think I am, and I don’t have the money to become a lawyer.” He paused, drawing on his third cigar of the evening. Delaney had been right, it was soothing.

“So what are you going to sell, honey?” Sally asked ironically. “I’ve been taught real good what I have to sell, so what about you? No one looks after us for nothing, Nate. I learned that. My ma might have done that for me, but she’s dead, and my pa…” She shook her head. “All he wanted was for me to be a cook and a hog slaughterer and a fowl keeper and a farmer’s woman. But that ain’t me. And if you ain’t a lawyer or a preacherman or a teacher, then what in hell’s name are you going to be?”