Charity Quietness sits in the toilet eating her two hard-boiled eggs while I’m having my ham sandwich and coffee in the kitchen. That’s how it goes, only don’t get the idea of ghettos. If there’s a ghetto, I’m the one that’s in it. She’s my cleaning woman from Father Divine and comes in once a week to my small three-room apartment on my day off from the liquor store. “Peace,” she says to me. “Father reached on down and took me right up in Heaven.” She’s a small person with a flat body, frizzy hair and a quiet face that the light shines out of, and Mama had such eyes before she died.

The first time Charity Quietness came in to clean, a little more than a year and a half, I made the mistake to ask her to sit down at the kitchen table with me and eat her lunch.I was still feeling not so hot after Ornita left, but I’m the kind of man – Nat Lime, forty-four, a bachelor with a daily growing bald spot on the back of my head, and I could lose frankly fifteen pounds who enjoys company so long as he has it