No, Rosa is a cold hand now, Miss.

After Pat proposed, Charlotte said that I had to learn more about That Irishman’s father. She said that men were more their father’s story than their mother’s. Charlotte was engaged to be married, so she said that she knew a thing or two about men.

“You better not let Mr. Cleneay hear that,” I teased.

“Alethea Foley, you know what I mean to say! Mr. Cleneay’s father butchered hogs back in Kentucky, and he taught Mr. Cleneay and his younger brothers to do the same. Those boys were the best for miles. Every one of them hired out to other plantations during hog-killing season. Since Freedom, they’ve been working and saving, and soon they’ll own their own butcher shop in Bucktown. Not a stall. A shop, Alethea. With sawdust on the floor, glass-fronted cases, and a brass bell for the front counter. No matter what happens, I know I’ll be eating well,” Charlotte said, sniffing the air. “I want the same for you, Alethea.”

“You want me to ask Pat if his father was a butcher?” I asked, smiling.

Charlotte stared at me hard and then declared what was in her heart all along. “That Irishman of yours—forgive me for saying—doesn’t know where he’s living. He thinks he’s above the law? And you, Alethea Foley, you think that foreigner is going to take you away from here? To an island? To the sea? Between the two of you, I don’t know who’s blinder.”

Charlotte and I didn’t speak again until the week before Pat and I married.

When Pat showed me the piece of paper that he said was our marriage license, I looked at it and saw it as proof that Charlotte was wrong. Pat did know where he was living, and he must know something about the laws of Ohio that she didn’t.

I don’t know where Pat got the license, Miss. Where anyone else in Cincinnati would.

I had proof that Charlotte was wrong, so I forgave her. I headed over to her husband’s shop to politely tell her so. Charlotte found me waiting for her by the locked front door of Cleneay Brothers, as dawn was breaking over the low roofs of Bucktown. She hugged me without saying a word. I’d missed her too. My bones had ached with the missing. It had been months since we last spoke, and her life had changed. She was Mrs. Cleneay now. I’d missed that too. Her wedding I hadn’t attended because I’d locked the kitchen door when she came to Mrs. Haslam’s to invite me. The day after their wedding dinner, Charlotte had brought over a piece of their cake and left it on the back steps. She wrapped it in butcher paper so that I would know. She was telling me, without having to say a word, that I should have been that cake’s baker, all seven layers of it. She was right.

Charlotte was still not believing in Pat though.