Terrence too had a lot of humorous anecdotes about growing up around here with lots of aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, everyone nearby. Except for his father, who had come from Alabama after serving on the Western Front in World War I, his family had been in California for generations. He told a story about an ancestor, sly, smart Nana Bowers, brought here as the slave of Mormon pioneers in the eighteen fifties, outwitting her owner in court, getting her freedom because California didn’t recognize slavery. The story was meant to elicit smiles, but slavery was a word I’d never heard except as part of a dry, academic past. I couldn’t imagine that word being part of your family’s story.

“Terrence and Booker was spoiled rotten, both of them,” Coralee said when she brought dessert, apple pie with ice cream. “Only two boys in a family of girls? And the youngest at that! These two boys, they couldn’t do no wrong in that house. All their lives they had women looking after them, me and my sister, Bonita, my mama, my grandma, the aunts, the great-aunts. My mama like to die of the happiness the day Terrence graduated from UCLA. She always knew Terrence gonna do something really fine one day. He was always a reader, a thinker, good with words. Mama was so sure he’s gonna be a writer, she made him take typing in high school. Shorthand too.” Someone called to Coralee and she left us.

Terrence chuckled. “I fought Mama something fierce on the typing and shorthand, but then, well, I go to school, and just lookie here! I was one of three boys in a typing class full of girls! Sixty-five words a minute,” he added. “And shorthand, well, I use shorthand every day on the job. My mother knew me better than I knew myself.”

“My mother doesn’t even like to look at me,” I said, surprised at my own candor. I brought my hand up to my right cheek. “From the time I was born she hated the sight of me.”

“Then you know what it is to be judged for your skin, don’t you?”

“I never thought of it like that.”

“Think of it,” he said. He smiled at me in a way that made me feel we were intimate allies. “You like the pie?”

“It’s wonderful. I’ve never tasted anything quite like it.” I sipped the last of the root beer float. “Did you always want to be a writer?”