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Gracie Mae, he says, I’ve come with a personal invitation to you to my house tomorrow for dinner. He laughed. What did it sound like? I couldn’t place it. See them men out there? he asked me. I’m sick and tired of eating with them. They don’t never have nothing to talk about. That’s why I eat so much. But if you come to dinner tomorrow we can talk about the old days. You can tell me about that farm I bought you.

I sold it, I said.

You did?

Yeah, I said, I did. Just cause I said I liked to exercise by working in a garden didn’t mean I wanted five hundred acres! Anyhow, I’m a city girl now. Raised in the country it’s true. Dirt poor—the whole bit—but that’s all behind me now.

Oh well, he said, I didn’t mean to offend you.

We sat a few minutes listening to the crickets.

Then he said: You wrote that song while you was still on the farm, didn’t you, or was it right after you left?

You had somebody spying on me? I asked.

You and Bessie Smith got into a fight over it once, he said.

You is been spying on me!

But I don’t know what the fight was about, he said. Just like I don’t know what happened to your second husband. Your first one died in the Texas electric chair. Did you know that? Your third one beat you up, stole your touring costumes and your car and retired with a chorine to Tuskegee. He laughed. He’s still there.

I had been mad, but suddenly I calmed down. Traynor was talking very dreamily. It was dark but seems like I could tell his eyes weren’t right. It was like something was sitting there talking to me but not necessarily with a person behind it.

You gave up on marrying and seem happier for it. He laughed again. I married but it never went like it was supposed to. I never could squeeze any of my own life either into it or out of it. It was like singing somebody else’s record. I copied the way it was sposed to be exactly but I never had a clue what marriage meant.

I bought her a diamond ring big as your fist. I bought her clothes. I built her a mansion. But right away she didn’t want the boys to stay there. Said they smoked up the bottom floor. Hell, there were five floors.

No need to grieve, I said. No need to. Plenty more where she come from.

He perked up. That’s part of what that song means, ain’t it? No need to grieve. Whatever it is, there’s plenty more down the line.

I never really believed that way back when I wrote that song, I said. It was all bluffing then. The trick is to live long enough to put your young bluffs to use. Now if I was to sing that song today I’d tear it up. ’Cause I done lived long enough to know it’s true. Them words could hold me up.

I ain’t lived that long, he said.

Look like you on your way, I said. I don’t know why, but the boy seemed to need some encouraging. And I don’t know, seem like one way or another you talk to rich white folks and you end up reassuring them. But what the hell, by now I feel something for the boy. I wouldn’t be in his bed all alone in the middle of the night for nothing. Couldn’t be nothing worse than being famous the world over for something you don’t even understand. That’s what I tried to tell Bessie. She wanted that same song. Overheard me practicing it one day, said, with her hands on her hips: Gracie Mae, I’ma sing your song tonight. I likes it.

Your lips be too swole to sing, I said. She was mean and she was strong, but I trounced her.

Ain’t you famous enough with your own stuff? I said. Leave mine alone. Later on, she thanked me. By then she was Miss Bessie Smith to the World, and I was still Miss Gracie Mae Nobody from Notasulga.

The next day all these limousines arrived to pick me up. Five cars and twelve bodyguards. Horace picked that morning to start painting the kitchen.

Don’t paint the kitchen, fool, I said. The only reason that dumb boy of ours is going to show me his mansion is because he intends to present us with a new house.

What you gonna do with it? he asked me, standing there in his shirtsleeves stirring the paint.