“Wear your sandals,” she called out. “There still might be glass on the floor.”

I lurched into the kitchen and fell into a chair. The Royal in its case sat on the table.

“I found it underneath the desk,” said Thelma as she put a mug of hot tea laced with sugar and milk in front of me. “Drink. You need it.” She sat down beside me, put her hand gently on my arm. I had never noticed she had such knobby knuckles, or that her veins stood up like thick blue skeins. “He’ll come to his senses, Roxanne. Terrence will be back. He loves you.”

I started to cry all over again, and confessed that I had given the bastard cop the whole thousand dollars I intended for Marian. “Can Marian wait a few days? I don’t think I can go to the bank today. I don’t think I can move at all.”

“Of course. Drink the tea. I’ll make you some breakfast.”

“I can’t eat.”

“You can. You have to. You’re going to need your strength, dear.”

I ate, got dressed, moved like a zombie back out to the living room, picked up the framed snapshot of Terrence and me, clutched it to my heart, and cried. At lunchtime, Thelma put a sandwich in front of me, and she sat by my side till I ate it, still holding the snapshot she had taken of the two of us.

I dialed the number at Naomi Avenue. The phone rang and rang. I dialed the Challenger and asked for Terrence. The switchboard operator said he was no longer there. “What do you mean?” But she hung up. I dialed Ruby’s and when she came to the phone, I said, “This is Roxanne, and I’m looking for Terrence.”

“Oh I just bet you are!” She gave me a nonstop five-minute tongue-lashing, no chance to defend myself, and finished up with “Handcuffed like a common criminal! His neck under the boot of some peckerhead cop! This man is a hero, and because of you, he’s beat up and disgraced? Disgraced! You been bad for him all along, and now this? You go to hell, missy, and don’t you never come back. Don’t you never come back here, that’s for sure!” The phone clunked once as she banged it against the wall before she hung up.

I called again, and this time Coralee picked up, as if she had been standing at the ready, knowing I would call back. “You think a man like Terrence is gonna take that kind of shame, and just say, it’s all right, just give me another fist to the face, white boy? Handcuff me, facedown with your stinking foot on my neck? Treat me like a criminal? You think a man with any kind of pride gonna take that shit?”