We always said that we’d go to Chinquapin together. He was going to show me where he grew up. We were going to visit his aunt, the one who raised him, and we were going to sit on her front porch and drink sweet tea and tell stories.

She’s the real storyteller in the family, he told me.

We said we’d go in the last days of summer or maybe the first few days of fall. We wanted to be there when the muscadines were ripe, and when the light is so beautiful in the fields, late in the afternoon, the woods in the shadows.

He once told me that we were like ships passing in the night. I still think of him out there, alive, beautiful.