Maybe Ophelia was already at a breaking point from residual anger over our situation, or from an accumulation of the fear and hurt we all had experienced. Or maybe, because she was strong-minded in her own right, she expressed her defiance by acting out. A good, smart, loving person always, Ophelia didn’t do anything specific—to my knowledge—to be sent away, but she must have at least talked back or disobeyed a rule or come home late one too many times. In any case, to blink my eyes yet again and find not just my momma gone but Ophelia too felt like too much heartbreak to bear. Adding insult to injury, Sharon and Kim were staying with family members on Freddie’s side, so I was a stranger in a strange land—even if Uncle Willie and Aunt Ella Mae were family.

It was only after Ophelia was no longer in the household that I really appreciated how she had always been there for me, how we were there for each other. We hardly had ever fought, except for maybe once when I performed surgery on her Barbie doll and sort of decapitated it. Maybe this was about jealousy over her having more Christmas presents than me—some years my take was just socks. Or it could have been my displaced anger over Freddie telling me, “You the only one who ain’t got no daddy,” or it could have been an early exploration of my latent surgical skills. Of course Ophelia was mad at me for destroying her toy. But she soon forgave me. Then there was the time that I spied on her and her friends during a girls’ club meeting. When I was detected looking through the peephole, one of her friends took a squeegee doused in soapy water and splashed it right into my eye! That burned like hell, but what really injured my eye was when I ran home and tried to wash the soap out with a rag that had cosmetics in it already. I was mad at Ophelia for not being more concerned—and it did cause permanent trouble for my eye.

For the rest, we had been almost inseparable, best friends. The previous July 4 stood out in my memory. Bessie’s kids and some of our older relatives and friends had money to go to Muskogee Beach, the place to go. Because we didn’t have that money, our option was to go to Lake Michigan to see the fireworks. To get there, we had to depend on Freddie to drive us there, drop us off, and come back to pick us up.

We arrived in time and enjoyed watching the fireworks with a large, local crowd. That was, until, as though choreographed, the last rocket burst into a thousand glittering chards in the sky and there was a sudden roll of thunder as the rain began to pour down. There was no shelter, and before long we realized that there was no Freddie to pick us up.

After it became really late, the only thing we knew to do was to walk home—like Hansel and Gretel trying to retrace and reverse our footsteps the opposite way he’d driven us. Combating the wet, cold, and hunger and our fear of getting lost, as we walked and walked we talked and talked. Still my main source of information about everything I knew nothing about, Ophelia decided to explain to me why the mail never came on time in our neighborhood.