I didn’t know right then that Pat and I would be man and wife, but I knew that if he asked I would say yes. Charlotte had told me that she knew that she and Mr. Cleneay were meant for each other when she got a lump in her throat and she couldn’t stop singing. When Pat gave me the sea, my heart was in my throat, and now that he had made Bill’s hazel eyes shine, my throat was full of songs. To this day, Bill still has those little men, chipped and faded, in a cigar box tucked among his books.

No, Miss, Pat was never a father to Bill. Pat couldn’t be what he had never known.

I suppose you’re right, Miss. I couldn’t have been a mother to Bill either then.

But for three years, we were a family in the ways that we knew how. We shared a roof and the walls of a tidy house. We ate our meals around the same table with three matching chairs with a fourth should there be a guest. After a good night’s sleep, we woke to find one another still there. Until one day, we didn’t.

No, Miss, Pat didn’t leave me for another Negress.

Is that what you’ve been sitting here thinking? That Pat had a—What do white people call it?—a civility toward my kind—

A proclivity. Yes, that’s the word, Miss.

Truth be told, I thought it too, at first.

When Pat and I were first trading stories, I’d found it strange that he knew the names of the streets in Bucktown—even the one where Bill and I were rooming at the time. Pat also knew his way around the Levee and its alleys where the stevedores and longshoremen drank away their wages. Pat said that his work had brought him to these colored neighborhoods, but I wasn’t sure how. A secretary to a librarian and a printing-house proofreader, neither had any business being in those neighborhoods. The white men whom we do see there, day or night, had a taste for strong drink and for the lowest of women.

I was too ashamed to tell Charlotte. I didn’t want her to think poorly of Pat. I didn’t want to either, but I did. I stopped talking to him altogether. I would acknowledge his greetings same as before but then continue with my evening chores. He continued to smoke his pipe on the back steps, despite seeing nothing but my back.

Penniless and friendless was how Pat decided to explain himself to me. When he first came to Cincinnati, he only had the name and address of one man, he said.

“The man was a kin of yours, Pat?” I asked.