“Yes, suh, I know.”

“Is that why you lookin’ at it so hard?”

“No. It’s jes’ when I walk by it, it look so pretty like Letta across the way from Uncle Coy’s windah. You have to look when somethin’s pretty.”

The white man turned his back on the boy and looked at his church. He maintained that position for a few moments, allowing Li’l Pea to admire the building a while longer.

When the white man turned around, his face was completely changed, as if he were a different man inside. He held out a hand to the boy. The child didn’t know what to do, but he was drawn to the gesture. He grabbed the minister’s manicured fingers with his dirty hand and gave them a good shaking.

“Thank you, boy,” the minister said. “You’ve shown me my own life in a new light. It’s like, it’s like I thought it was day but really there was much more to be seen.”

The white man walked away after that.

Ptolemy had often wondered, in the eighty-four years that had passed since that day, what the minister had meant.

“Come on, Papa Grey,” Hilly said in a bus a million miles away, “this our stop.”

They walked down a long street of sad houses and apartment buildings. There were few lawns or gardens, mostly weeds and broken concrete. Some of the houses had no paint left on their weathered wood walls; one or two seemed crooked because they were falling in on themselves from the ravages of termites, faltering foundations, and general rot.

Ptolemy thought all these things but he couldn’t remember how to say them.

“Terrible.”

“What, Papa Grey?”

“Terrible.”

“What? You hurt?”

“My knees hurt when I walk.”

“That’s too bad.”

“But it’s not terrible,” Ptolemy said.

“Then what?”

The old man glanced across the street and saw a big sand-brown woman sitting on a stoop. She was smoking a cigarette and between her fat knees were huddled two toddlers in diapers and nothing else.