you. You seem to be a very lonely little girl.”

She might as well have spit in my face. This is such an insulting thing to hear that I wouldn’t have been able to think of anything to say anyway, even if I were letting words out of my mouth.

I expect her to go on with her insult, to explain why she thinks I’m a lonely little girl (even if she is right)—but instead she takes another breath. “I know your mother.”

And here, I’m not proud to say, I break my vow—immediately, without even a pause of hesitation. “What do you mean, you know my mother?”

“Doreen Murphy,” she says. “Doreen Hendricks, when she was little. Would you like to hear more about her?”

I nod. I don’t need to be silent to see the salt that begins to shine in Miss Joe’s eyes.

Miss Joe calls home to let my father know that I’ll be going to her house for dinner tonight. She drives a red pickup truck, and in the back are bundles of fruit she picked for herself: kenep with juices leaking from the pits, and mangoes that remind me of miniature suns, and brown plantains so brown they look rotten. She lets me sit in the front of the truck, and the broken leather scratches my thighs, and the seat stuffing spills out and tickles my skin. Miss Joe turns on the radio so old people’s music begins to play, and she sings along loudly so I don’t feel like I have to be polite and start talking about stuff that doesn’t matter. She reaches behind her and pulls out a sliver of sugarcane and hands it to me, and her eyes smile at me, though her lips just keep on singing their tune.

The sugarcane is sticky, and I chew it so hard that it hurts my teeth. Cars race by, zooming in front of Miss Joe, and usually taxi drivers would cuss and throw up their hands whenever a car zooms in front of them like that, but Miss Joe just goes on singing her songs. She turns a corner and drives into a market that makes me roll up the window to keep out the stink of dead fish. Miss Joe points out the woman standing in the shade of the post office and tells me she is ninety years old, and for a second I think she’s the woman in black, her skin is so dark, but no—she’s just a woman hiding from the sun.

And then it hits me, what Miss Joe said. Ninety years old? I can’t even imagine being twenty, let alone ninety, and I’m already positive that I won’t live past sixteen, because I’m more than sure that this world will never let me live to an important age like that, and everyone will have to come to my funeral and cry about how they treated poor little Caroline Murphy, and beg my spirit for forgiveness (which I’ll give out of the mercy of my heart)—but maybe in the same way that I can’t imagine being ninety, this woman looks at sea turtles and thinks she cannot imagine being two hundred years old, and maybe the sea turtle looks at our islands and thinks he cannot imagine existing since the beginning of time.

Miss Joe stops the truck on the side of the road, right under a sign that says NO PARKING. A girl even smaller than me runs toward us before she bursts into moths that fly into my hair and make me near jump right out of my skin. Miss Joe takes no notice. She walks me down a side street where no car can fit. The path is paved with cement, and there are wild roses on either side, so long that the thorns threaten to scratch my arms. At the end of the path is a one-story house made of rotting wood, even though most houses in the Virgin Islands are made of concrete so they won’t be blown away by the hurricanes.

Here is what I know about Miss Joe: She doesn’t have a husband, and she doesn’t have any children of her own. Just from listening to what the other children at school say, I know that not many mothers like Miss Joe. They say she’s a woman that isn’t really a woman at all, but is a snake in disguise. When her red pickup truck breaks down, she doesn’t have a man to call, so she fixes it herself. When she’s thirsty or hungry, she cooks for herself and only herself, not for a husband asking for this and that. She’s like the slaves back in the day who weren’t really slaves at all because they’d taken their freedom, and lived in their own houses, and owned their own clothes, and ate their own food. People didn’t like seeing slaves like that, and people don’t like seeing a woman like that now either. It makes those people even madder when Miss Joe stands so tall and reads big books and talks like she has not a care in the world. I decide in that moment that I want to be precisely like Miss Joe, and I stand a little straighter.

Miss Joe takes me to her living room, which is just like her office: overflowing with books and journals and newspapers and magazines. I’ve got to move a heavy pile of books from the stained sofa before I can sit down. Miss Joe fixes me a plate of beef stew and plantain and lets me eat in the living room and asks me about my favorite class (history) and my least favorite subject (math), and when she asks me if I have a favorite novel (Behind the Mountains by Edwidge Danticat), she gets up right then and there to hand me books by Jamaica Kincaid and Tiphanie Yanique and stateside women too, like Zora Neale Hurston and Octavia Butler, and she tells me that these books

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