As we dashed up the stairs, Bruno saw us and started barking wildly, but he must have been chained up, because he didn’t jump the fence. Terrence paused just briefly on the porch to look out over the beach, the sea, and the horizon, a view he had always loved. I opened the door (the matchbook still securely in place) and we dropped the suitcase and the typewriter on the floor and hungrily made our way to the bed, where the five months of our being parted had pent up in both of us. We made love swiftly, intensely, remembering each other’s bodies with every possible sense: touch, taste, scent, words. We slept and woke, and had something to eat, and he talked in a roundabout, anecdotal way of his time in Alabama. I noticed right away that his speech had slowed in the months he’d been gone. Even the way he used language had slid into an easy vernacular, as if August Branch’s insistence on correct usage had slipped his mind altogether. His talk was peppered with more biblical allusions than I remembered, and phrases I didn’t recognize. What is a hissy fit? What is Hoppin’ John?

We talked until other hungers came over us, and we made love again, slower, not so urgent, deeper and more tender, more gratifying. By the time I woke again, it was full dark, and I got out of bed, drank a glass of wine, read a little, and then came back and slid in beside him. I put my arms around him, whispered as he tossed and turned. “I’ll always be here.” He eased, and reached over and patted my behind before he slept again. I lay awake for a long time listening to the sound of his breathing, gratified that Terrence had come home to me unharmed, that he was home to stay.

But Terrence had brought a thousand strangers with him. These strangers filled up the house and spilled out onto the porch and down to the beach. Montgomery seemed to move into Malibu. Over a big breakfast he talked about the people he had ferried back and forth to work in his old Ford. Some were nameless but vivid. Some specific people I could see as clearly as if they stood in front of me, like a scrawny little firebrand named Miss Jessie, and people like Jo Ann Robinson, Ralph Abernathy, Martin Luther King, Mr. E. D. Nixon, the Reverend Elijah Cooke, Mrs. Cooke, the Cooke daughters, the Cooke grandchildren, Mrs. Cooke’s great-aunt Patience and their neighbor Alice Washington.