She loved Luther because that kind of mean was not in him. She loved Luther because what made him wild was the same thing that made him kind—he loved the world. Loved it the way you loved an apple so sweet you had to keep taking bites from it. Loved it whether it loved him back or not.

But in Greenwood, that love and that light of Luther’s had started to dim. She couldn’t understand it at first. Yes, there were better ways to get married than the way they did, and the house on Archer was small, and then the plague had come to town, and all of this in a short eight weeks—but still, still they were in paradise. They were in one of the few places in the whole world where a black man and a black woman walked tall. The whites not only left them alone, they respected them, and Lila agreed with Brother Garrity when he declared that Greenwood would be a model for the rest of the country and that ten to twenty years from now there’d be Greenwoods in Mobile and Columbus and Chicago and New Orleans and Detroit. Because the blacks and whites had figured out how to leave one another be in Tulsa, and the peace and prosperity that came with that was too good for the rest of the country not to sit up and take notice.

Luther saw something else, though. Something that ate away at his gentleness and his light, and Lila had begun to fear that their child would not reach the world in time to save its father. For on her more optimistic days, she knew that’s all it would take—for Luther to hold his child so he’d realize once and for all that it was time to be a man.

She ran a hand over her belly and told the child to grow faster, grow faster, and she heard a car door slam and knew by the sound of it that it was that fool Jessie Tell’s car and that Luther must have brung that sorry man home with him, the two of them probably high as balloons that had lost their strings, and she got up from her chair and put her mask on and tied it behind her head as Luther came through the door.

It wasn’t the blood she noticed first, even though it covered his shirt and was splashed up along his neck. What she noticed first was that his face was all wrong. He didn’t live behind it no more, not the Luther she’d first seen on the ball field, not the Luther who smiled down into her face and brushed back her hair as he moved in and out of her on a cold Ohio night, not the Luther who’d tickle her until she screamed herself hoarse, not the Luther who drew pictures of his child in the window of a speeding train. That man did not live in this body anymore.