“Afternoon, Octobia May.” For a quarter a week, Mr. Piers gives me organ lessons. I’d rather play the piano. But the organ came with the house. Interrupting him, Mrs. Loewenthal brings up my crochet lessons. I played stickball with Jonah yesterday and skipped it. I give her my word I will be there later today. Then I ask Auntie for permission to go to the basement. Standing behind me kneading my shoulders, she is ignoring me. Asking our boarders about their aches and pains, instead.

Mrs. Ruby comes down last, her ruby-red shoes sparkling like Dorothy’s in The Wizard of Oz. The cane she uses is from Ireland. Her husband was a college professor at Lincoln University and they went there once. “Open your own bank account. Even in secret. Otherwise your husband may spend all the money and you won’t know anything until he is deceased and you are a widow living hand to mouth in someone else’s home.”

I am thinking about vampires. Not husbands. Walking into the dining room beside me, she compliments Auntie on “another lovely feast.”

Everyone takes a seat at the table except him, who never eats with us, by the way. I tell Auntie it’s because vampires cannot eat people food. Of course she doesn’t believe me. Now she has them all talking about him and how he saved someone during the war. Mrs. Loewenthal pinches my cheek. “A true American hero.”

I light the candles. Jonah turns the radio on low. Mr. Nat King Cole sings “Mona Lisa” and sets Mr. Buster’s foot to tapping.

Auntie finishes filling my glass with sassafras tea. Mr. Buster gets back to the war. It’s been over eight years, but the grown-ups say they’ll never forget it. Maybe because everyone lost someone in the war. I lost an uncle I never met. Mr. Buster lost his wife. She did not like having a husband so far away and found herself a new one. Mrs. Loewenthal brings up her grandfather and the two spinster aunts she lost. They died in concentration camps.

“That Hitler.” I cover my mouth because I do not like to speak his evil name. He killed so many people. I get sad when I think about it. But lucky her. Her family escaped.

“You and your husband mind washing all them dishes?” Jonah knows the story by heart. “If I was a college teacher I wouldn’t want to do that.”

I think about my father.

In Germany, her husband was a college professor. Then everything changed. They escaped, though, to Sweden. Writing letters to colleges here. “Such jobs were in short support. Lots of colleges in this country would not hire Jews.” But they came anyway. She cooked. He took a job as a butler. And kept writing letters. Lincoln University. A Negro college said yes. “Come. We can use a good teacher like you.” Mrs. Loewenthal reaches for Mrs. Ruby’s hand. “They treated us like family at that university. The students write to me still.”

It’s Auntie who lightens our mood. “Cheer up. ’Cause everybody at this table done earned the right to some good times.” She mentions the Depression, World War II, and the millions of people those Nazis killed. Jim Crow and the Korean War, too.

“Who’s Jim Crow?” Jonah whispers.

Auntie lifts her glass. We all do. “Cheers!” She stands. “Here’s to good jobs and all that we want in life.” She says America is on the right track and things are looking up for everybody.

Jonah jumps up. “I want to shake Satchel Paige’s hand.”

Mrs. Loewenthal is happy again. “Then it will happen, Jonah. Believe.”

I stand up for Auntie. “Somebody will give you that loan. I know it!”

Everyone is singing it now, “Happy Days Are Here Again,” including Jonah, who marches around the table using a spatula as a baton, singing louder than the rest. But it’s when the singing is done that we all hear it.

Tick. Tap. Tap. Tap, tick, tap … tick.

Everyone stares at the ceiling. The noise is coming from his room.

He’s awake. Typing in the daylight — which he never does. We are quiet for a bit. But not him. Busy as a bee in a bonnet, he worries the keys. And me.

“What’s on your mind, Octobia May?” Mr. Buster holds up a bowl filled with Brussels sprouts and winks. “Vegetables or vampires?”

They all laugh. Even Miss Marble, who sat in the parlor with me Thursday evening and would not turn my hand loose when Mr. Davenport shimmied down the fire escape steps and hurried up the block, wearing a trench coat and fedora hat when the night was hot. And the moon was full.

“Evil’s got this way about it,” Miss Marble told me. “Having toast at somebody else’s table one morning. Sitting at the foot of your bed, come nightfall.”

Mrs. Loewenthal asks me to tell everyone a story. “But no vampires. No monsters. I do not approve of that kind of talk.” Because of her family, blood and devil stories make her very nervous.

She sets a nickel by my fork. Mr. Buster places a dime beside it. Jonah’s penny adds to the pile, by the time I finish the story.

Following supper, I rush down the stairs, begging my dress not to trip me. “Did he come?” I ask the servants. “Is it still here?”

Jonah walks over to the furnace, kicking around coals that fell from the bin. I point to my pretend servant friends, roasting squirrels on the spit. Sweating from all the heat.

I open the lid, slowly. Juppie meows louder than ever before. Lifting the hat, I let them all see. “It’s gone.”