If it weren’t for the fact that Angie was sitting across from him, John thought he might have been able to drift off to sleep, so familiar was the cadence of the conversation, Harriet’s voice and Pearl’s moving back and forth, the lilt to the ends of their sentences that turned everything into a question, the way they drew in a sharp breath that meant an emphatic yes. But Angie was right there, and she was listening to them, taking notes in her head, the way she did when her curiosity was aroused.

“God only ever talked to me directly once,” Harriet said, sounding wistful.

“He did?” Angie sat up straight. Her expression was interested, intrigued, totally serious, as she would be with anyone she was interviewing. John had seen her like this before, with Miss Zula most recently but also back in Manhattan, that lost summer, when he had gone with her while she worked on a short film for a homeless shelter that needed promotional material for fund-raising. She talked to drunks and addicts and street vendors, to mounted policemen and sidewalk artists, and every one of them opened up to her, just as Harriet was opening up now, wiggling a little in her seat in anticipation of telling her story. John found that he was vaguely interested himself.

“He surely did,” Harriet said. She put her hand on Angie’s arm. “This was back when I was expecting Joey, my youngest boy? I wasn’t no more than three months pregnant at the time, and I was sitting in the parlor reading the new Cosmo when a voice came right down from the heavens to me. And God said—I remember exactly—he said, ‘He will die in the seventh month.’” She paused, her eyes large and round, waiting for Angie to laugh, maybe, or to tell her that such a thing was impossible. It was what people usually did when Harriet told one of her stories, but Angie only nodded.

“Go on,” she said.

“Well,” said Harriet, “at first I was so upset, can you imagine? I thought he meant the baby. But then Joey was born that May without much fuss at all—”

“You had such easy labors,” Pearl said with a sniff.

“—and I got to thinking, and it occurred to me that maybe God was talking about Tab? My husband? So I waited right through to the end of July, but Tab never did die. Now every year when July comes around I get my hopes all up, but come first of August, there’s Tab sitting across from me at the breakfast table pouring skim milk on his Wheaties.” She paused. “I still don’t know what the good Lord was trying to tell me.”