When you’ve been taught that you are lesser, there was another way to empty yourself of anger, the stubborn kind, the kind closer to shame. It was cheaper than drink, but it cost those around you more. I didn’t tell Pat about this other way. He came to it on his own.

Pat from the start kept an even longer workday at the Commercial. He was proving his worth to his new master, I told myself.

Yes, Miss, I meant his new employer. I misspoke.

Pat began by taking his notebook of ideas and writing them all up for the Commercial. He even wrote a story about me.

Can you imagine that, Miss?

Cobbling together the stories that Aunt Sweetie had told me and that I had told him, Pat wrote that a reporter—at the Commercial Pat didn’t have a byline either, at first—sat on the kitchen stairs of a boardinghouse while its cook—a healthy, well-built country girl, good-looking, robust, and ruddy—shared with him ghost-people stories.

Pat didn’t mention me by name or Mrs. Haslam’s, but if you read that story now you would know, Miss.

Salee Plantation was in there too, but Pat didn’t mention its name either, only that it was between Augusta and Dover. He called it a farm instead of a plantation, which I didn’t tell him was wrong when he read the story aloud to me. He included its apple orchard, elder-brushes, and the owls that lived in its beech and sugar trees, but what he described as its farmhouse he took from another story, one that was set in the place where Aunt Sweetie had lived when she was young. Pat said that Aunt Sweetie’s farmhouse was more aspic.

Yes, that sounds more like Pat’s word, Miss. The farmhouse was more atmospheric.

Pat even wrote Mr. Bean into the story. Well, only his name. I hadn’t been able to recall the true name of the queer old man who Aunt Sweetie said had invited his neighbors over for a fancy supper and served them a giant black snake, prepared as if it were a poached fish. Like I said, Pat took from this story and borrowed from that one, until even I couldn’t remember where anything had once belonged. Pat assured me that if the story made their skin crawl, then the readers wouldn’t care one bit whether the old man’s name was really “Mr. Bean” or not. Pat didn’t venture whether Mr. Bean himself would care.

“Are you saying the snake is the heart, Pat?” I asked.

The way that the snake can creep underneath the readers’ skin, Mattie, is the heart, he replied.

Once Pat began at the Commercial, my own workday also had to change. Pat now came home for dinner and returned to the newsroom again, until the early hours of the following day. Serving Pat a noonday meal meant setting the bread dough to rise the morning before. Yeasted bread, he told me, was also required at the dinner table. It meant an early walk to the beef butcher instead of a morning visit with Charlotte at her house. It meant—