Helen gave me another of her penetrating looks. “Very funny. You’re not the only one who’s ever had a marriage end, you know.” She paused. “Anyway. He’s not attached, but it’s my distinct impression that he likes it that way. I’d steer clear if I were you. He seems … I don’t know … murky. Like you could get sucked right in and pulled under if you weren’t careful.”

“Just trying to learn about my fellow faculty, that’s all.”

Helen took a long, deliberate sip of her wine. “Uh-huh,” she said.

I leaned back on the sofa, trying to recapture the ease I had felt a minute ago and trying to forget this morning’s brief fantasy about him. I wasn’t really interested. Not that way Not really at all. The late afternoon light cast gathering shadows across the room, and the fire died down. It would be nice to stay here, bathed in these soft women’s voices. Nice to stay here for a while and just not have to move.

The Past Is Prologue

I SOMETIMES WONDER what my father would think if he could see me now. It is surprising to me how often I think of him, especially when I consider that I have not seen his face in forty years. I chose not to attend his funeral ten years ago. My mother indicated that it didn’t matter to her one way or the other if I went, so I didn’t go. He was a hard man. A sharecropper. He would laugh until he cried if he saw these boys here playing at farming, treating cows like household pets. He knew nothing but the hardest work there was, for the least reward imaginable, from sunup to sundown, until the day he died.

When I was young, I would get up with him, walk out on those sticky Georgia mornings to milk the cows and feed and rake and plow and till—all for a red-faced white man whom we saw but once a month and who took every dime we earned. I wanted to love my father, but he didn’t allow it. Eventually, I came to accept this.