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that displayed vacancy signs, and she even learned to shun certain neatly manicured black neighborhoods.
    “Where’s your husband?”
    “I ain’t got one.”
    “This is a respectable place!”
    As the evening approached she cursed the aching feet that were beginning to fail her and she cursed her haste in leaving the only shelter they had, but then she thought about the gnawed bottle nipple and kept walking. She had her week’s pay; she could go to a hotel. She could buy a oneway ticket home. Tomorrow was Sunday; she could look again. She could go home. If she found nothing Sunday, she could try again Monday. She could go home. If nothing Monday, she must show at work for Tuesday. Who would keep the baby? She could go home. Home. Home.
    In her confusion Mattie had circled the same block twice. She remembered passing that old white woman just minutes before. She must have wandered into one of their neighborhoods again. She started to approach her and ask for directions to the bus station, but she changed her mind. She shifted Basil in her arms and silently walked past the fence.
    “Where you headin’ with that pretty red baby? You lost, child?”
    Mattie looked for the direction of the voice.
    “If you wants the bus depot, you walkin’ in the wrong direction, ’cause nobody in their right mind would be trying to walk to the train station. It’s clear on the other side of town.”
    Mattie realized that the old woman was actually talking to her, but it was a black voice. She hesitantly approached the fence and stared incredulously into a pair of watery blue eyes.
    “What you gapin’ at? You simple-minded or something? I asked if you lost?”
    Mattie saw that the evening light had hidden the yellow undertones in the finely wrinkled white face, and it had softened the broad contours of the woman’s pug nose and full lips.
    “Yes, mam. I mean, no, mam,” she stammered. “I was looking for a place to stay and couldn’t find none, so I was looking for the bus depot, I guess,” she finished confusedly.
    “What, you plan on sleeping in the depot with that baby tonight?”
    “No, I was gonna buy a ticket and go home, I guess, or find a hotel and try again tomorrow, or maybe find a place on the way to the depot. I don’t know, I…” Mattie stopped talking because she knew she probably sounded like a complete fool to the woman, but she was so tired that she couldn’t think, and her legs were starting to tremble from lack of sleep and the heavy load she had carried around all day. She bit on her bottom lip to hold back the tears that were burning the corner of her eyes.
    “Well, where’d you sleep last night?” the woman said softly. “You get kicked out?”
    “No, mam.” And Mattie told her about the boardinghouse and the rat.
    “And you just pick up and leave with no place to stay? Ain’t that a caution. Whyn’t you just plug up the hole with some steel wool and stay there till you could get better?”
    Mattie tightened her arm around Basil and shook her head. There was no way she could have slept another night in that place without nightmares of things that would creep out of the walls to attack her child. She could never take him back to a place that had caused him so much pain.
    The woman looked at the way she held the child and understood.
    “Ya know, you can’t keep him runnin’ away from things that hurt him. Sometimes, you just gotta stay there and teach him how to go through the bad and good of whatever comes.”
    Mattie grew impatient with the woman. She didn’t want a lecture about taking care of her son.
    “If you’ll just show me the way to the depot, I’ll be obliged, mam,” she said coldly. “Or if you know somewhere that has a room.”
    The woman chuckled. “No need to go gettin’ snippy. That’s one of the privileges of old age—you can give plenty of advice ’cause most folks think that’s all you got left anyway. Now I may know of something available and I may not,” she