“Looks like Christmas should, don’t it?” The man slid his chin over his girl’s head and his nostrils widened as he smelled her hair.

“Sure does,” Luther said, surprised it didn’t come out “Sure do” in an all-white car.

“Heading home?”

“Yeah.”

“To family?” The white guy lowered his cigarette to his girl’s lips and she opened her mouth to take a drag.

“Wife and child,” Luther said.

The man closed his eyes for a second and nodded. “That’s good.”

“Yes, sir, it is.” Luther swallowed against the wave of solitude that tried to rise in him.

“Merry Christmas,” the man said and took his cigarette from his girl’s lips and put it between his own.

“Same to you, sir.”

In the Giddreauxs’ foyer, he removed his coat and scarf and hung them, wet and steaming, on the radiator. He could hear voices coming from the dining room and he smoothed the snow into his hair with his palms and then wiped his palms on his coat.

When he opened the door into the main house, he heard the overlapping laughter and overlapping chatter of several conversations. Silverware and glasses clinked and he smelled roast turkey and maybe a deep-fried one as well and some kind of cinnamon scent that might have come from hot cider. Four children came running down the stairs toward him, three colored, one white, and they laughed maniacally in his face when they reached the first floor and then ran full-out down the hall toward the kitchen.

He opened the pocket doors to the dining room and the guests turned to look at him, women mostly, a few older men and two about Luther’s age whom he took to be the sons of Mrs. Grouse, the Giddreauxs’ housekeeper. Just over a dozen people, all told, and half of them white, and Luther recognized the females who helped out at the NAACP and assumed the males were their husbands.

“Franklin Grouse,” a younger colored man said and shook Luther’s hand. He extended a glass of eggnog. “You must be Luther. My mother told me about you.”

“Nice to meet you, Franklin. Merry Christmas.” Luther raised his glass of eggnog and took a drink.

It was a wonderful dinner. Isaiah had returned from Washington the night before and promised he wouldn’t talk politics until after dessert, so they ate and drank and chided the children when they got a little too boisterous and the talk jumped from the latest picture shows to popular books and songs and then to the rumor that war radios would become a consumer item that would broadcast news and voices and plays and songs from all over the world, and Luther tried to picture how a play could be performed through a box, but Isaiah said it was to be expected. Between phone lines and telegraphs and Sopwith Camels, the future of the world was air. Air travel, air communication, air ideas. Soil was played out, ocean, too; but air was like a train track that never met the sea. Soon we’d be speaking Spanish and they’d be speaking English.