Miss Caroline was also at the breakfast table, and I saw the crumbs around her lips formed into a half smile. She took her coffee with three spoonfuls of sugar, and she always drank two cups with breakfast. Mrs. Haslam used to say that spinsters had the biggest sweet tooth, followed by widows and children. Mrs. Haslam complained that she had to buy an extra pound every month just for Miss Caroline and Miss Beryl. Miss Beryl, a spinster too, had already left the boardinghouse by the time I’d started, but Mrs. Haslam always brought her name up whenever she complained about Miss Caroline, as if there were still two.

Pat and Miss Caroline, in spite of their shouty beginning, became friends. Both didn’t abide chatter, especially in the mornings. She was devoted to the pages of the Cincinnati Commercial but also read the Cincinnati Enquirer when Pat began to write for it. They traded newspapers at the end of each day, and the next morning at breakfast Miss Caroline would silently point to the stories that he’d written. I didn’t understand that this was a game they played until Pat told me that the Enquirer printed his stories without his name. He had a term for it.

Yes, that’s right, Miss. A byline.

Listen, Miss Caroline may not be as important in the world as Pat, but it’s because you don’t know her story yet. She, as with most spinsters I’ve known, was of independent ways. Miss Caroline and Pat had that in common. They also didn’t have a lot of money by the standards of white people, but the money they had they spent on books and on their underthings.

You’re taking notes now, Miss?

Well, I can tell you how I met Pat—I know that he made a name for himself as “Lafcadio Hearn” but that wasn’t the man I knew—and what he wore underneath his clothes, those two stories don’t have much to do with each other. Why I left him, now that had to do with the state of his underthings.

Charlotte had tried her best to warn me, but I didn’t hear her like I should have. Charlotte did the laundry at Mrs. Haslam’s back then. She took over the work from another gal, around the same time that Pat came to stay. Charlotte—Mrs. Haslam and the boarders called her “Lottie”—was from Kentucky, like me. We didn’t look much alike—different as a buckeye and a peanut—but Charlotte was a sister to me from the moment that we met. I liked hearing her stories even more than Pat would like hearing mine. Charlotte and I, we grew up with stories that were brambly, full of leaves, and with branches going every which way. When you reached the middle was when you were rewarded with the juicy berries, the sweetest fruits.