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younger. He had jet-black hair and a neat beard, wore thick rimless eyeglasses and carried a handsome gold pocket watch on an intricate fob even when he lounged around the house in baggy flannels.
    Joe didn’t talk much about his past, except for an occasional remark like the one he’d made about his grandfather’s farm. I did know he’d grown up in England and taught Slavic languages at George Washington University.
    Henry Post, the other male boarder who shared a room with Joe on the third floor of the house, was positive Joe was a Commie pinko, all these refugees Roosevelt’s crowd let into the country were. I didn’t know if that was true, but I’d be Red, too, I thought, if the world had stood by and let Hitler occupy my country.
    ‘Have you been out here long?’ I asked.
    ‘Oh, yes,’ he said, ‘watching you go about your pastoral duties.’
    Don’t blush, I told myself, don’t blush. Joe came out here to relax and read, not to admire you. You’re way past admiring age. I took off my straw hat and stowed the watering can under a bench. Dark, heat-generated clouds had begun to gather to the south, so Joe followed me inside, bringing the chair with him and restoring it to its place at the kitchen table.
    ‘After spending all day inside a classroom it was nice to be outside for a bit, even in this heat,’ he said.
    Dellaphine was downstairs changing for her Friday night women’s sewing circle at the Gethsemane Baptist Church, so I washed the tomatoes and left them on the drain board.
    ‘Want to go out to get something to eat?’ Joe asked.
    ‘Too hot, too crowded,’ I said. ‘And it looks like it might rain. I was going to make a sandwich. Want one?’
    Dellaphine appeared at the door wearing a flowered shirt-waist dress, carrying her piece bag in one hand and white patent-leather pocketbook in the other.
    ‘You all can have some of the leftover ham,’ she said. ‘And there’s bread in the bread box. Miz Phoebe is upstairs in bed with a sick headache.’ Phoebe Knox’s two sons served in the navy somewhere in the Pacific, we didn’t know exactly where. ‘Miss Ada’s playing at a tea dance,’ Dellaphine continued. ‘And I don’t know where Mr Henry is.’
    ‘I expect he stopped somewhere to eat, since you don’t cook for us on Friday nights,’ Joe said, teasing her. ‘What we’re paying forty dollars a month for I don’t know.’
    Dellaphine snorted. ‘You be lucky to get Sunday dinner,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t whine no more if I was you.’
    After Dellaphine left I fixed ham and tomato sandwiches, which Joe and I ate with leftover Waldorf salad made the right way, with lots of apples, nuts, raisins and Duke’s mayonnaise, and tall glasses of cold milk. After we finished Joe took our plates and glasses over to the sink and washed them. He was the only man I knew who’d ever washed a dish. The first time I saw him do it I just plain gaped.
    Whenever Joe and I were alone, I had a heightened awareness of him that was almost electric, like the tingle I felt looking out over a rough ocean before a thunderstorm. I’d never felt that way before, not even with my husband, although I told myself that was because I’d known Bill since we were children.
    That must be what made Joe different from my husband, from any other fellows I’d had crushes on. Bill had been just a boy, and I only a girl, really, even when we married. Joe was a man. And I was now a grown woman, away from my family’s, my neighbors’ and my church’s watchful eyes, emancipated by my widowhood and my move to Washington.
    I didn’t know what to make of my feelings and had no reason to think Joe noticed them. Besides, this, whatever it was, infatuation, desire, maybe just curiosity, embarrassed me. I flushed, wondering if everyone else in the boarding house noticed that Joe affected me so.
    When alone, silence tended to fall between us. I never knew what to talk about with Joe. He was so well educated and worldly