He wrapped his long fingers around the steering wheel and drove with an easy certainty, double-clutching when necessary. The Porsche didn’t ride like the MG; it seemed to sit lower to the road, and the engine had a deeper tone. The leather seats had their own peculiar odor. Terrence Dexter was a fearless driver, downright scary. I held tight to the door handle. He was speeding and taking curves faster than he should. Certainly faster than I would have taken them, and I consider myself an experienced driver.

“You have to master a Porsche or it will master you,” he said laconically.

“Well, my MG has mastered me. Sometimes I swear it stays more at Reg’s than it does with me.”

“An MG is like a little-bitty firefly that has some magic. But a Porsche isn’t like that. A Porsche is like an eagle. No magic, but it has strength.”

“That’s an odd, imaginative way to talk about a car.”

He shrugged, and gave me a look that made me vaguely uncomfortable. When I see this sort of look on people’s faces, I always assume they’re looking at the stain on my cheek and thinking, Oh, that poor girl with her ugly cheek. But he couldn’t see the birthmark on the right side of my face, and his assessment was of an oddly different nature.

“My brother, Booker, and I used to do valet parking for parties at your granddaddy’s when we were in high school. Summit Drive is where I acquired my taste for fast cars and pretty women. We drove some fine sets of wheels till Clarence caught us driving the cars without white gloves, and, well, there was hell to pay. Said we had to promise we’d wear the gloves, all valets gotta wear gloves. So we quit. Just walked off laughing while he . . . well, he was plenty steamed.”

“Why would he insist on gloves?”

“So our black hands wouldn’t be touching the white folks’ steering wheels.”

This had never occurred to me. Of course servants wore gloves. I might have said something, but Terrence Dexter passed a lumbering Buick on a curve, downshifting for a burst of speed, rousing a blast of the Buick’s horn. I clung to the door.

“Clarence is the squarest of the squares. Everything gotta be just so. He’s my uncle, married to my Aunt Ruby.”

Clarence had nephews? I knew nothing of his life. “Does anyone else in your family work at Summit Drive?” I asked for want of anything else to say other than Please slow down.

“Well, over the years some of my cousins have been waiters at the big parties. And they wore white gloves, you can bet on that. Aunt Mavis used to be a cook there.”