“Shall I make some fudge?”

“Not today. We still have some.”

“What can I do?”

“You can pound flour into the top round. Will you eat with us?”

“No. I’m going to a birthday party, thank you. Do you think he’ll be a minister?”

“How do I know?” said Lee. “Maybe it’s just an idea.”

“I hope he doesn’t,” said Abra, and she clapped her mouth shut in astonishment at having said it.

Lee got up and pulled out the pastry board and laid out the red meat and a flour sifter beside it. “Use the back side of the knife,” he said.

“I know.” She hoped he hadn’t heard her.

But Lee asked, “Why don’t you want him to be a minister?”

“I shouldn’t say it.”

“You should say anything you want to. You don’t have to explain.” He went back to his chair, and Abra sifted flour over the steak and pounded the meat with a big knife. Tap-tap—”I shouldn’t talk like this”—tap-tap.

Lee turned his head away to let her take her own pace.

“He goes all one way,” she said over the pounding. “If it’s church it’s got to be high church. He was talking about how priests shouldn’t be married.”

“That’s not the way his last letter sounded,” Lee observed.

“I know. That was before.” Her knife stopped its pounding. Her face was young perplexed pain. “Lee, I’m not good enough for him.”

“Now, what do you mean by that?”

“I’m not being funny. He doesn’t think about me. He’s made someone up, and it’s like he put my skin on her. I’m not like that—not like the made-up one.”

“What’s she like?”

“Pure!” said Abra. “Just absolutely pure. Nothing but pure—never a bad thing. I’m not like that.”

“Nobody is,” said Lee.

“He doesn’t know me. He doesn’t even want to know me. He wants that—white—ghost.”

Lee rubbed a piece of cracker. “Don’t you like him? You’re pretty young, but I don’t think that makes any difference.”

“ ’Course I like him. I’m going to be his wife. But I want him to like me too. And how can he, if he doesn’t know anything about me? I used to think he knew me. Now I’m not sure he ever did.”

“Maybe he’s going through a hard time that isn’t permanent. You’re a smart girl—very smart. Is it pretty hard trying to live up to the one—in your skin?”

“I’m always afraid he’ll see something in me that isn’t in the one he made up. I’ll get mad or I’ll smell bad—or something else. He’ll find out.”

“Maybe not,” said Lee. “But it must be hard living the Lily Maid, the Goddess-Virgin, and the other all at once. Humans just do smell bad sometimes.”

She moved toward the table. “Lee, I wish—”

“Don’t spill flour on my floor,” he said. “What do you wish?”

“It’s from my figuring out. I think Aron, when he didn’t have a mother—why, he made her everything good he could think of.”

“That might be. And then you think he dumped it all on you.” She stared at him and her fingers wandered delicately up and down the blade of the knife. “And you wish you could find some way to dump it all back.”

“Yes.”

“Suppose he wouldn’t like you then?”

“I’d rather take a chance on that,” she said. “I’d rather be myself.”

Lee said, “I never saw anybody get mixed up in other people’s business the way I do. And I’m a man who doesn’t have a final answer about anything. Are you going to pound that meat or shall I do it?”

She went back to work. “Do you think it’s funny to be so serious when I’m not even out of high school?” she asked.

“I don’t see how it could be any other way,” said Lee. “Laughter comes later, like wisdom teeth, and laughter at yourself comes last of all in a mad race with death, and sometimes it isn’t in time.”

Her tapping speeded up and its beat became erratic and nervous. Lee moved five dried lima beans in patterns on the table—a line, an angle, a circle.

The beating stopped. “Is Mrs. Trask alive?”

Lee’s forefinger hung over a bean for a moment and then slowly fell and pushed it to make the O into a Q. He knew she was looking at him. He could even see in his mind how her expression would be one of panic at her question. His thought raced like a rat new caught in a wire trap. He sighed and gave it up. He turned slowly and looked at her, and his picture had been accurate.

Lee said tonelessly, “We’ve talked a lot and I don’t remember that we have ever discussed me—ever.” He smiled shyly. “Abra, let me tell you about myself. I’m a servant. I’m old. I’m Chinese. These three you know. I’m tired and I’m cowardly.”

“You’re not—” she began.

“Be silent,” he said. “I am so cowardly. I will not put my finger in any human pie.”

“What do you mean?”

“Abra, is your father mad at anything except turnips?”

Her face went stubborn. “I asked you a question.”