What now? Keep it simple, stupid.

“So are you from the Caribbean?” I asked.

He nodded.

“Cool. Which island?”

He said the name and I squinted as if it were unfamiliar to me.

“It’s small,” he said hurriedly. “Most people here don’t know it.”

“How long have you been in the U.S.?”

“Seventeen years.”

He’d left less than a year after Alison’s death.

“So what made you decide to leave home?”

He rubbed his hand back and forth against his cheek. Guiltily, or merely uncomfortably?

“It became difficult to find work.” He bent his head toward his plate, scooped a forkful of crimson stew neatly into his mouth, and chewed silently, mouth closed. Was there something off about these tidy habits? An attempt to distract, or to mask, or to convince oneself of one’s own tidiness of character? I wanted to ask him why it had become difficult to find work and see what he would say, but I was wary of pressing him.

“You miss it?” I asked instead.

For a moment, a distant look came into his eyes. I imagined that in his mind he was back—the crystalline water, the sandy roads, a small white house that had once been his.

“You get used to things.”

“Do you visit often?”

“Never.” He said this quietly and definitively. He yawned.

“Long day?”

“My partner left the car with a flat. I went to a garage on Forty-fourth to get it fixed, but the nut was stuck and they couldn’t repair it. I had to go all the way back to Queens. It used to be any garage could fix this.”

“Nothing works the way it used to, does it?” It was a false stab at commiseration, and I cringed inwardly. But he seemed to appreciate the comment. Or maybe he’d merely grown very good at appearing to appreciate comments like this from people like me.

I sipped at my Carib, and for a while we ate in silence. I wanted to move the conversation forward, but I understood that above all I must not do anything to make him suspicious. But why would he be? Wouldn’t he just assume I was exactly what, in a way, I was—another white interloper in the new Brooklyn, my interest in his life motivated by a desire for self-assuagement, to prove to myself that I was a good community member, I cared about lives unlike my own, et cetera?

He cleared his throat. “What about you? Where are you from?”

“Nowhere. Well, pretty close to it. Indiana,” I said with droll self-deprecation. “Starlight, Indiana, to be precise.”

My response was not premeditated. The location rose to my lips by instinct. In the fourth grade we did a unit on the fifty states and, much to my disappointment, I had been assigned Indiana. (I’d had my heart set on Louisiana. Wild alligator swamps. Dark mystical voodoo.) I made a diorama on foam board with Crayola cornfields, brown sand for the plains, plastic cattle. I remembered Starlight because this name had seemed to me to be the state’s single redeeming characteristic.

“Starlight. That’s beautiful.”

“Yeah, well,” I said, rolling my eyes. I leaned toward him. “I don’t visit, either.” I conjured an expression of guarded sadness, designed to intimate some deep ocean of painful personal history: my childhood difficult, my reasons for leaving Starlight, Indiana, equally so, as if to say to Clive Richardson, See? I have secrets, too. I, too, live in exile. “It’s funny. I’ve been in New York four years now, and it still feels sometimes like this is someone else’s life I’m living.”

It was only after I said this that I realized I really did feel this way. Though I didn’t know it then, this was to become my method during these evenings at the Little Sweet. With Clive, I confessed to feelings I had not previously articulated even to myself. Yet these emotional truths were presented within a fictional architecture. My feelings of alienation from my own life, for example, were not caused by some banishment from Indiana. It was Alison’s death that had cast me into the simulacrum.

“Just so.” He tucked back into his food.

“I can’t believe your partner left you with a flat. People,” I said with a scoff.

“People.” With his spoon, he gathered the last of the crimson sauce.

We stood in unison and threw away our trash, slid our trays onto the stack on top of the garbage bin. On the television, a woman dressed as a squirrel had just won an all-expense-paid trip to Bermuda. From behind the counter, Vincia watched us as we walked out of the restaurant and onto the street.

I’M NOT sure I will ever be able to explain what it was like to sit across from Clive Richardson at the Little Sweet. I had never felt anything like it before and I haven’t since. I suppose it might best be called clarity—a sense, bestowed as if from some source outside of myself, that I was exactly where I was supposed to be, doing exactly what I was supposed to be doing. On my walk home that first night I was breathless, the danger of what I’d just done swirling with euphoria at how skillfully I’d managed it. I didn’t delude myself that he’d especially enjoyed our interaction, but it was a beginning. I would figure out who he needed and I would become that person. I would gain his trust, insinuate myself into his life. And I wouldn’t be alone. Alison had been with me that night, giving me words I would never have found on my own. The closer I drew to Clive, the more powerful her presence became, as if they were a unified system, the two poles of a closed circuit, amplifying themselves within me.

All of this sounds crazy, I know, and when I look back on it, on how far things went, it’s difficult to understand how I allowed myself to be pulled under so deeply. But I had stepped into Clive Richardson’s taxi. One can understand how such an unlikely occurrence could make a person believe she had a purpose, a fate, that transcended the ordinary realities of her world. Even all these years later, knowing what I do now, I cannot disabuse myself fully of the notion that forces were at work that season that defy easy explanation. At times I wondered, and wonder still, if Alison hadn’t strung all of this together from some perch beyond this world.

As the city released itself from the showy burdens of fall and grew quieter and colder, my life steadily reduced until it revolved entirely around two intertwined rituals: I could not stop listening to Alison’s diaries and I could not stop seeking out Clive. Her voice and his, that was all.

SO LAST night at dinner, my parents were having this totally riveting conversation about the dead patches on the lawn and my mom gets that Very Nice expression on her face that means exactly one thing, which is, I’m about to say something positive about a black person, and she goes, “It’s never looked the same since John died,” and my dad says, “That man was a miracle worker.” Then my mom turns to me and says, “You remember John, don’t you, sweetie? You loved him. You were so sad when he died. You cried and cried.” She smiled her sweet little smile. Whatever, it’s not worth getting into with her because it’s beyond her limitations to understand, so I just smiled a sweet little smile back, but in my head I was thinking, Wrong. Incorrect. That is not even remotely what happened.

Maybe you don’t even remember John anymore, Old Person Me. I don’t know what you still remember and what’s been crowded out by the fascinating life I really, really hope you’re living. John was our gardener when I was really little. He died when I was maybe four. Cancer, I think. I remember he had this pure white, lamb’s-wool hair and extremely dark skin. He came once a week to mow the lawn and every week my mom took me outside to say hello to him. He always tried to talk to me, but I always hid behind my mom’s legs. My mom would say, “She’s so shy,” which wasn’t true, I was a really gregarious kid, and obviously my mom knew that. I remember being completely terrified of John but not knowing why. My fear of him was totally inexplicable to me. I just felt it.

I remember when my mom told me he died, and I wasn’t crying because I loved him. I was crying because here was this really nice old man who had just wanted to be friendly to me, and on some level I got that my fear of him was bad, and maybe it hurt him, maybe I hurt him.

My mom just drives me crazy. Like, you do not get to choose to raise your family in a place with only white people plus a few Indian and Chinese doctors and then convince yourself that your kid desperately loved the black gardener who you took her outside for some beneficial interaction with, and that this love is proof that even though you made the choices you made, it doesn’t matter, because your kids are good and you are good and you are all just so very, very good.

I RETURNED to the Little Sweet again a few nights later. Clive looked up when I walked through the door. He did not acknowledge me, and I pretended not to notice him. I got in line. I could feel him watching me. Vincia was curt with me, all business. I paid for my food. Then I turned and let my eyes fall on him as if I’d just spotted him. I walked over to his table.