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what I’m feeling now. I’m not even sure myself. But you were with her at the end, you were the last person saw her alive. I thought maybe we could talk about that, what Ez did, what she said. I don’t know why I think that might help. But it might. What else do I have?”
    “A few last words,” I said.
    “Right. Like Goethe’s More Light!, Thoreau’s Moose! Indians! Or the grammarian: I am preparing to, or I am about to, die. Either may be used . I did an article on last words once. Now the most important thing in my life’s just happened, and I know I’ll never write about it.
    “But if you can spare me half an hour or so, Griffin, I’d appreciate it. And I’ll be in your debt.”
    We walked toward Claiborne, to a place called the Spasm Jazzbar flanked by a storefront Western Union and Hit and Run Liquors, in one of those easy silences that can settle in unexpectedly. Two feet past the open door, the bar itself was as dark and fraught with memory as Straughter’s thoughts must have been. Whatever burdens came in here never left; they remained, became a part of the place, piled up atop previous layers.
    A couple of walkers sat together at the bar. Both looked over their shoulders as we entered. I knew one of them, a friend of Verne’s they called Little Sister on the street, a white girl who always worked the colored parts of town. Little Sister said something to her companion and they both turned back to their daiquiris.
    Straughter and I stopped off at the bar for double bourbons on our way to a table in the back corner. Chairs were still inverted on the table. Not that the place ever closed, but they shoved things around and ran a mop through from time to time. Then the invisible layers, the real refuse, would part to let the mop pass and close like a sluggish sea behind it.
    “I’m sorry. I really don’t know what else to say. I’ve never had anyone I loved—” I became aware of my pause elongating “—die.”
    But I went on to tell him about B.R., about the fight, how Esmé and I had met in the wake of it all. The way she crossed her legs and slumped down in the chair and held her glass up to whatever light there was, constantly checking levels, color, how the world looked through that amber lens—as though placing it between herself and the light of some pending eclipse.
    He must know all this, I said.
    Yes, of course. But the particulars are what matter.
    “We decided to go get some food. Dunbar’s, maybe. Or Henry’s Soul Kitchen. That time of night, a mixed party, choices were limited.”
    She didn’t talk a lot about you, I told him.
    When in fact she’d said nothing at all.
    “Funny, but even after she called in her story and said now she could relax, she still listened more than she talked. Watching people, listening to them, the way they moved, how they leaned in and out of conversations. Always somehow apart. I guess she never got far away from that. All these stories, all these lives, went on spinning around her.
    “So she didn’t say much. Asked me a lot of questions about my life. But about her own, from what little she did say, I definitely had a sense of strength at the center, at the core.”
    “Me.”
    “You.”
    Straughter went up to the bar and brought back new drinks.
    “Thanks,” he said. “I appreciate your telling me that. And I want you to know that my appreciation is in no way diminished by your story’s being an utter lie.”
    I started to protest, but he cut me off.
    “Ez would never have spoken to anyone about me. Not once in all these years did she talk to anyone else about our life together. She just plain would not do it.”
    I spread my hands on the table between us. What could I say?
    “But the rest, I’m grateful to you for that. Sometimes the smallest souvenirs turn out to be the best ones, with time.”
    “I don’t really see how I could have helped.”
    “But you did. Want one more?”
    “Sure, but it’s my turn. Beer okay?”
    I put the