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boy had another think coming if he thought anything he could do would make me show fear. I had become an expert at hiding how I really felt. I’d grown up around Daddy. I shrugged to the boy’s face; I was too busy wondering just how his cousin could hear a B-flat like that. Maybe they listened to music in the portables all day, for all I knew about what went on in there.
    “What’s that mean?” the boy asked. “Shrugging like that?”
    I shrugged again.
    “You ever hear of the
Admiral,
the entertainment boat? My daddy’s a trumpet man in the band,” she said. “Sweet music for dancing because that’s what the people like. He can run a scale about ten times in one breath. I’d say he can play pretty good.”
    She dropped her satchel and, as if her fingers could show me what she would someday mean to me, she cupped her hands around mine. When she did, I saw that the insides of her palms were lighter than the rest of her, brown-pink and warm. Her breath told me she’d been chewing Beemans gum.
    I’d once found a lifeless cardinal lying in the street and I’d carried it home in my palm, hoping I could bring it back to life and rescue it. When I dripped water from the kitchen faucet over its head and it didn’t revive, I gave a funeral and sang and buried it. The feeling Aurelia gave me, reaching out to me in genuine friendship, was the same feeling I’d had as I troweled rich soil over the redbird’s carcass. I felt I’d been entrusted with something precious.
    She focused on the grass between my fingers again. “Hold it tighter. Like this.”
    The boy hurried her—I guess I made him edgy—when the buses drove up. “You miss the bus, Aurelia, they’ll skin you.”
    “Wait!” I called as she hopped over me and the last three steps, too. “You live in the Ville? Could I come see you sometime?”
    She turned and nodded, swinging her satchel.
    I blew again on my thumbs and the grass made a new, beautiful sound.
    Even now, even after everything that has happened, I sometimes get scared calling Aurelia my friend. Because, used to be, every time I found a friend, I ended up having to give her away. I ended up having to give my friends away to protect them from Daddy.
    This thing that had been born on the day of the grass reed grew into many afternoons, a series of quick whispers and giggles in which Aurelia let me in on details of her family. I felt like I had known Eddie Crockett and Aunt Maureen a long time before I met them. Aunt Maureen, who’d raised Aurelia from a baby after her mother had taken off, who wouldn’t let you in through the front door before she tried to feed you. Aurelia’s daddy, Eddie Crockett, who played trumpet music sweeter than Sarah Vaughan could sing.
    That morning as I made the detour from the A&P, the sun already blazed so hot you wanted to stand under a tree and do nothing. I hadn’t thought about it being Sunday until no one at Aurelia’s duplex answered the door. From the porch I could hear a trumpet running scales, the notes as light and sweet as the early-morning dew that had fallen on Mama’s laundry because she’d never taken the time to bring it inside. I stood for a minute, listening, before I rang the bell again and pounded so hard that the screen rattled. If Eddie Crockett was alone in the house practicing, he wouldn’t hear me—I already figured that.
    I heard boots tramping and the door swung open just as I was about to leave. Eddie Crockett stood with his trumpet in hand, his fingers entwined among the valves, his black hair with waves that lay over his forehead like they’d been pasted on. The stairwell still smelled of hotcakes. “Well, bless my soul,” he said. “Look who we’ve got at the door again. You come to see Aurelia?”
    I nodded.
    “Don’t you know it’s Sunday morning? Sunday mornings, she gets all cleaned up and goes to church.”
    Aurelia had talked about the Antioch Baptist Church plenty to me; I’d passed it before, one of the