“Miss Caroline’s underthings are bedecked with lace,” Charlotte whispered. She claimed it was French lace, but I wasn’t certain how she would know. The lace didn’t speak to her, did it? Charlotte had never met a Frenchwoman or a Frenchman for that matter, but lace from France she insisted she knew because the finer trimming shops in the city displayed them in their windows. She never thought that she would see some at Mrs. Haslam’s. Lace as delicate as just-fallen snowflakes was how Charlotte went on to describe it. After spending the better part of her time waxing about that French lace, she added at the very end, like an extra yolk in a cake batter, that Miss Caroline’s underthings, every single smock and drawer, were sewn from heavy China silk. Charlotte then left me, slack-jawed, to finish her rounds for the day.

When I saw Charlotte again, I had to promise to bake her a cobbler—it was high summer, so she asked for blackberries, as any gal from Kentucky would—if she would unwrap the snowflake bundle so that I could see and touch.

I shivered.

Charlotte, right alongside me, shivered too.

Then we both laughed because it was only cloth, but it made us feel joy.

On Tabb Plantation where I was born, we young ones would bathe in a shallow stream that ran along its border. It must have been the property line because we were told never to wade to the other side. There was a time in the year, right after the crab-apple blossoms had dropped, when the water felt like that to me. Silk on my skin, and when we were young, our skin was also silk. That was how I would describe that stream to Pat. It was in the first story that I would tell him. Looking back now, it was an odd place to begin.

“Silk?” Pat asked.

“Silk,” I said again, nodding my head.

Pat closed his eyes when he listened to my stories. I thought at first that I’d lulled him to sleep, so I stopped talking. His eyes opened, and his good one had a look in it, as if I’d denied him something good to eat. He explained that he listened best in the dark, and I believed him.

“I’ve longed for that stream,” I told him. “Never longed for Tabb or for what it meant to be born there,” I told him too.

That’s right, Miss. My last name isn’t Tabb.

My mother was hired out to Foley Plantation before I was born, and Mr. Foley purchased me when I was young. He gave me to his daughter and her new husband, who owned Salee Plantation between Dover and Augusta, if you know that part of Kentucky. I was their wedding gift.