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Trudy was saying, “It’s not like me to feel sorry for a man, but I sure do for this one.”

I looked at her.

“You ever know Mrs. DuPree to come out second? After all these years of working for her? No, ma’am. She’s not going to give up this easy; she’ll get him one way or the other. The sergeant might as well go on and marry Lydia Prather and do what his mama wants. If you ask me, he’ll save himself a heap of wear and tear if he gives up now.” Trudy plucked the cobweb from the broom’s bristles. “Lydia Prather sure will have her hands full. Mrs. DuPree will run her life, just you wait and see. Well, good luck I say. I say that to any woman what marries Mrs. DuPree’s son.” She rolled the cobweb into a little ball and threw it into the garbage pail.

I turned away and pinched the inside corners of my eyes to keep from crying.

Every morning during his leave Isaac was up early, his eyes puffy from all those late nights, just so he could have his bacon and eggs with the boarders. It was like he missed the company of men and how they talked when their women weren’t around. Each day he sent the men off to the slaughterhouses with more stories about the West and how there, most anything was possible if a person was willing to work. The land of opportunity, Isaac called it. The land of opportunity.

After the men had gone off to the slaughterhouses, Isaac settled into the habit of wandering into the kitchen. He wore a gray suit and a black tie—civilian clothes, he called them. I liked him as much in his suit as I did in his blue uniform. The first two mornings Isaac sat on the kitchen stool and watched me work. We talked about nothing much, usually the weather, or maybe the news from the daily paper. Sometimes Trudy was there washing down the walls or dusting the floorboards. By the fourth morning, he was lending a hand, drying the dishes and emptying the pan of dirty dishwater out back. He never talked about Lydia Prather, and I was glad for that. I didn’t want her in the kitchen with us.

On the fifth morning, Isaac told me about his father, a man I didn’t know much about other than he’d been a doctor.

“Father never turned a sick person away,” Isaac said. “He practiced at Provident Hospital, helped start the nursing school there. Had this house built for Mother when they got married. It wasn’t so close to the slaughterhouses then or the railroad tracks. But everything changed when Father died. I was fifteen. Cancer of the lungs. He was sick a long time, and Mother spent all their savings trying to find a cure. Borrowed against the house. He knew it wasn’t any use, but you know Mother.”

That made me feel bad for Isaac; a boy of fifteen needed his father. But there was something else that made me feel even worse: the groove that ran between us. Isaac’s father was educated and had done important things; mine had been a slaughterhouse man. Isaac had finished high school; I had to quit after the eighth grade. He was fair; I was dark. Outside of this kitchen, Isaac would never look twice at a woman like me.

The thing he talked most about, though, was land. “Don’t get me wrong,” Isaac told me and Trudy on the seventh morning of his leave. “I’m not taking anything away from Booker T. Washington.” He sat on the kitchen stool, a cup of coffee in his hand. The kitchen smelled rich. The coffee was fresh, and there was raisin bread rising in the oven.

“Good thing,” Trudy said. She put linens to soak in a pan on the counter. “Your mama thinks the world of that man.”

“And so she should. But being a tradesman isn’t good enough, not for everybody. Booker T. Washington needs to understand that. A man’s got to have land. I’ve staked my hundred and sixty and nobody’s ever taking it from me.” Isaac paused. “Nobody.”

“Don’t think anybody’d dare,” I said. I was washing two mixing bowls. “But it’s the weather; it all comes down to the weather. I was raised on a farm and that’s what I most remember. Worrying about the weather.”

“Your