I wondered from time to time how Mr. Rossiter had felt about this when he’d been alive. Maybe Mrs. Rossiter had become so fixated on Durwood since her husband had died? I’d never known M. T. Rossiter, who had departed this world over four years ago, around the time I’d landed in Shakespeare. While I knelt in the bathroom, using the special rinse attachment to flush the shampoo out of Durwood’s coat, I interrupted Mrs. Rossiter’s monologue on next month’s Garden Club flower show to ask her what her husband had been like.

Since I’d stopped her midflow, it took Birdie Rossiter a moment to redirect the stream of conversation.

“Well… my husband… it’s so strange you should ask, I was just thinking of him…”

Birdie Rossiter had always just been thinking of whatever topic you suggested.

“M. T. was a farmer.”

I nodded, to show I was listening. I’d spotted a flea in the water swirling down the drain and I was hoping Mrs. Rossiter wouldn’t see it. If she did, Durwood and I would have to go through various unpleasant processes.

“He farmed all his life, he came from a farming family. He never knew anything else but country. His mother actually chewed tobacco, Lily! Can you imagine? But she was good woman, Miss Audie, with a good heart. When I married M. T.-I was just eighteen-Miss Audie told us to build a house wherever on their land we pleased. Wasn’t that nice? So M. T. picked this site, and we spent a year working on the floor plan. And it turned out to be an ordinary old house, after all that planning!” Birdie laughed. Under the fluorescent light of the bathroom, the threads of gray in the darkness of her hair shone so brightly they looked painted.

By the time Birdie had reached the point in her husband’s biography where M. T. was asked to join the Gospellaires, a men’s quartet at Mt. Olive Baptist, I had begun my next grocery list, at least in my head.

An hour later, I was saying good-bye, Mrs. Rossiter’s check tucked in the pocket of my blue jeans.