Ruby stopped with her pencil above the pad. Thirty-eight years was longer than she had been alive, and he spoke the number with the precision of somebody who had counted every one of them. She could have asked who he meant, but there was a gentleness in his expression that warned her not to turn his private hope into ordinary diner conversation. Instead she said, "I'll wrap the jam separately. That way whoever comes can decide." The old man considered this as if it were a particularly wise arrangement and nodded. "That's kind of you, miss. My name is Ezekiel Walker, by the way. Folks used to call me Zeke." "I'm Ruby," she replied.
Ezekiel had not seen Millstone in nearly forty years, although he could have drawn every street of the old town from memory. In the spring of 1960, he had lived in a narrow white house on Poplar Street with his wife, Hazel, and their six-year-old daughter, Beatrice. He repaired signals for the railway, a job that sometimes kept him outside through the night, and Hazel worked as a seamstress for a clothing shop that paid her less than her skill deserved. They were not wealthy, but they had a vegetable patch, a porch that caught the evening breeze, and a daughter who believed her father could fix anything if he had a wrench and enough patience. On Saturdays, Ezekiel bought Beatrice a biscuit at the Silver Star's side window, the one through which Black customers were served in those days.
He remembered her little red hair ribbon most clearly. Beatrice had thick dark curls that never stayed where Hazel tried to pin them, and she insisted the ribbon gave her the dignity of a lady who could attend a fancy supper. Ezekiel would pretend to bow when she stepped out of her bedroom, and she would laugh so hard that the bow on her head tilted sideways. She hated mustard, loved strawberries, and drew crooked stars on every scrap of paper she could find. One evening she announced that when she grew up she would own a library, because books seemed to be the only things in the world that could visit everywhere without buying a ticket. Hazel had looked over at her husband, smiling, and said, "That child is going to travel farther than either of us."
The summer rains started in May, but the worst storm arrived on the evening of June seventeenth. Water climbed the banks of Blackwater Creek, entered the low streets of Millstone, and rose over the steps of the public school where families had gathered after the first evacuation order. Ezekiel had helped carry sandbags all afternoon before railway officials sent him to check a damaged signal box near the northern bridge. He did not want to leave Hazel and Beatrice, but the superintendent said the rail crossing had to be secured before the last freight train entered town. Hazel pressed their daughter's hand into his and promised they would wait at the school gymnasium. He kissed them both beneath the awning, never imagining that the distance between two neighborhoods could become the distance between two separate lives.