You haven’t finished your coffee, Miss. I brewed that pot right before you got here. You’re not used to the taste? There’s toasted cornmeal mixed with the coffee grounds, like how Molly made it during the blockade. No one does that anymore, especially not on this side of the Ohio, but I still have a taste for it. A tad sweet without even adding sugar, don’t you find?

“Tastes like war,” Charlotte would say whenever I’d offer her some.

“Tastes like Freedom brewing,” I’d say right back, which always made Charlotte take another sip.

“War-coffee” was what Pat called it when we were keeping house. He wasn’t fond of the coffee that I’d served him back at Mrs. Haslam’s either. “Cincinnati-coffee” was what he called that or, sometimes, just “brown water.” He preferred a sludge-like brew or a strong cup of tea. Like I said, Pat wasn’t from here.

His place of birth, he told me, was an island in the Ionian Sea, but beyond that he had no memory of it. When he was born, it was called Santa Maura, and the island answered now to Lefkada.

“They named the island after you?” I asked, recalling Pat’s first evening at Mrs. Haslam’s and the odd sounds that Mr. Bean had offered to the boarders.

Pat smiled, raising his head so that our eyes met—that was when I first saw the ring of moss in the dark brown of his eye—and he replied that he was named after the island.

“Then your island didn’t go anywhere. You carry it with you,” I said.

Pat insisted upon his version of the story.

The island did go somewhere. It went from the United Kingdom, whose hands it was in when he was born, into the hands of a country called Greece, Pat said. He was ten and four when the name changed, and it had left him feeling lost.

“But you have no memory of the island,” I reminded him.

The island of his birth had disappeared from the maps of the world, he said. He was only two when he left its shores with his mother. How could he ever go back now? he asked of his shoes, his voice low and hoarse.

I could hear that he was in mourning. It made me wonder about his mother and whether she was still alive, but I spoke of other things for a while because his eye was becoming a spiderweb of red.

“Tell me about the sea,” I said. “I’ve only seen rivers and streams.”

Pat had me close my eyes and think of the sound of the wind as it sweeps through a field of tall summer corn. I did. He had me sway my shoulders from side to side, as if I were in midsong. I did. Now, imagine the bluest sky, Mattie, but it is above you and underneath you. I did.