“No,” he said. “Not those stories.”

“New ones, then?”

Danny opened his door. It was a reflexive gesture, but then he looked in Tessa’s eyes and saw that the effect had been anything but casual.

“You want to come in and talk?” he said.

She stood there in her coat and the threadbare white shift underneath, looking at him for a long time. He could see her body underneath the shift. A light sheen of perspiration dotted the brown flesh below the hollow of her throat.

“I want to come in,” she said.

CHAPTER nine

The first time Lila ever laid eyes on Luther was at a picnic on the outskirts of Minerva Park in a green field along the banks of the Big Walnut River. It was supposed to be a gathering of just the folks who worked for the Buchanan family at the mansion in Columbus, while the Buchanans themselves were on vacation in Saginaw Bay. But someone had mentioned it to someone and that someone mentioned it to someone else and by the time Lila arrived in the late morning of that hot August day there were at least sixty people going full-out for high times down along the water. It was a month after the massacre of coloreds in East St. Louis, and that month had passed slow and winter-bleak among the workers at the Buchanan house, pieces of gossip trickling in here and there that contradicted the newspaper accounts and, of course, the conversation among the white folk around the Buchanan dinner table. To hear the stories—of white women stabbing colored women with kitchen knives while white men burned the neighborhood down and strung their ropes and shot the colored men—was plenty reason to have a dark cloud drift down into the heads of everyone Lila knew, but four weeks later, it seemed folks had decided to retire that cloud for a day, to have fun while there was fun to be had.

Some men had cut an oil drum in half and covered the halves in cattle wire and started barbecuing and folks had brought tables and chairs and the tables were covered with plates of fried catfish and creamy potato salad and deep brown drumsticks and fat purple grapes and heaps and heaps of greens. Children ran and folks danced and some men played baseball in the wilting grass. Two men had brought their guitars and were cutting heads against each other like they were standing on a street corner in Helena, and the sounds of those guitars was as sharp as the sky.

Lila sat with her girlfriends, housemaids all—’Ginia and CC and Darla Blue—and they drank sweet tea and watched the men and the children play and it wasn’t no trick at all to figure out which men were single because they acted more childish than the children, prancing and bowing up and getting loud. They reminded Lila of ponies before a race, pawing the dirt, rearing their heads.

Darla Blue, who had all the sense of a barn door, said, “I like that one there.”