“I don’t really talk to her much anymore,” Shiloh had said, sorting through the cardboard box of his things, long legs kicked up on the coffee table.

“Why not?” I said. “Is she not useful?”

“No, Gish is a sponge,” Shiloh said. “She hears everything.”

“So what’s the story?” I’d said.

He’d shrugged. “No story. Something about her just bothers me. I don’t know what, exactly.”

I’d pressed him to elaborate, but he wouldn’t, and when Shiloh doesn’t want to talk about something, it’s over.

So I’d met with Ghislaine personally, a month or two later- I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t who’d showed up.

Ghislaine Morris was 22, not thin, but not fat either. She had a sweet, open face and full hips. Her blond hair was cropped in a short, boyish style, and her brown eyes were friendly. She was pushing a stroller, with a then six-month-old baby in it. He had curly brown hair and cinnamon skin and huge eyes that took in the world like documentary cameras.

Over an inexpensive meal, Ghislaine told me about her life, about Shadrick’s father, who was “no longer in our lives,” and about her parents in Dearborn, Michigan, who’d kicked her out of the house when they’d found out she was pregnant with a child whose father was black, so that Ghislaine had to come to Minnesota to stay with a friend. She had a shoplifting bust on her record, but had gotten probation. She told me she wanted to go back to school as soon as she could.

It was a meeting that I’d left rather confused. I had no earthly idea what it was that Shiloh saw in her that he didn’t like. Shiloh was a preacher’s son; if he had a flaw, it was his judgmental streak. Maybe he couldn’t overcome a Puritan’s disapproval of single motherhood at such a young age. For my part, I’d found her chatter infectious and her devotion to her son palpable. If her ambitions to go back to school and “make something” of herself were somewhat generic, who was I to judge?