“Three whole weeks and no Octobia May. I feel like I, too, am being punished.” Mrs. Loewenthal opens her arms wide. “Now, how many hugs do you have for me this fine morning? Three weeks’ worth, at least, I hope.”

I am in her warm arms, slobbering up her black sweater with my tears. Happy that Mrs. Ruby is not too far behind, I run to her and do not mind her kisses wetting up my forehead.

They both sit on my bed. Side by side. Mrs. Loewenthal taking my hand. Do I know what I’ve done, she asks. “Taken the joy out of supper.” Without my stories she says they are forced to gossip about neighbors and family, and that is never a good thing.

“Or worry over our aches and pains.” Mrs. Ruby’s wrinkled fingers find her swollen knee. “If only you’d behave, Octobia May.”

Before I know it Miss Marble has made her way into my room. “Behave. With that devil of a man downstairs inspiring her to discover his secrets?”

Mrs. Loewenthal’s pockets are always full of butterscotch candy. She pulls out a handful. I choose first. Then she shares with the rest.

“What’s it like?” I unwrap the candy.

They all look at me curiously.

“Outside, I mean. I don’t even know what color the sun is anymore.”

They get a good hardy laugh out of that. I even see their bellies jiggle. They have spoken to Auntie repeatedly, they say, and she is firm in her thoughts that I had to be punished extra hard so I knew what I have been doing wasn’t right.

I want to tell them about the money and other treasures, but I’m afraid they will turn against me, too. “She says I do not know anything about freedom.” I walk across the room and lay on the floor.

Mrs. Loewenthal nods. “Negroes and Jews. So long we seek freedom. So hard a thing for us to find, it appears. People have always tried to keep it from us.”

“Like how Auntie doesn’t want me to be free.”

The whole room is silent. The ladies’ faces look different but the same. Mrs. Loewenthal says, “Tsk, tsk, Octobia May. Maybe Shuma is right.”

Mrs. Ruby asks if I am the same girl she’s known all this time. Because if I were I’d know I am “the most privileged Negro child in the neighborhood.”

I do not like to disappoint them, but I have. Curling up in my grandpap’s chair across from them, I apologize. They each pull out a story. And beg me not to pull out any of my own. Mrs. Ruby talks about her mother. She saw the Union soldiers march into town on horseback when she was eight. She sits up tall and proud, holding on to the charm necklace her granny left her. “Now, why were they there, Octobia May?”

“The soldiers?” I know I should know. My parents had talks with me about some things. But I don’t much care about wars. Or stories that aren’t in books.

“To free the slaves, like my mother. So Negroes today could live and work wherever they want. Do whatever we think we were born to do.”

For the first time in a long time, I think of the Negro kids down south without Auntie’s encouraging me. What about them? I ask. “They’re not able to do all that they want.”

Miss Marble agrees. “All Negroes ain’t free, north or south. Lots more needs to be done to equal things out in this world.”

Mrs. Loewenthal mentions first coming to America. “So big. So many different kinds of food, people, neighborhoods. A wonderful place to live. To be free, but not always so wonderful I soon learned.” She takes Mrs. Ruby’s hands. “Too many signs, businesses, groups speaking hate.”

“No Catholics, Negroes, or Jews …” Mrs. Ruby shakes her head.

Mrs. Loewenthal and Miss Marble finish her sentence. “Only Gentiles need apply.”

“Oh, I seen it time and time again.” Miss Marble crosses her arms when she talks about the time she, a rabbi, and his wife had to use the freight elevator to get inside a hotel.

I frown.

“A dirty, filthy elevator they used to haul broken furniture, trash, foul-smelling garbage, and God knows what. They made us take that! Plenty other hotels did, too. ’Cause people like us wasn’t fit to walk in through the front door, they figured.”

I listen while they talk about other troubles that have landed on the doorstep of Negroes and Jews in our country. Then Miss Marble brings up the Germans.

When Mrs. Loewenthal begins to rock, I know it’s the war that is drawing her near. “They took our freedom from us a little at a time. Until we were fleeing. Or trapped in the ghettos, starving. And still others …” She whispers her aunts’ names. Then opens her eyes.

I am glad, I say, that they did not hurt her. But she says what happens to one Jew, happens to all Jews. “If we remember that, we will stay free.”

I repeat what she says, but it comes out different. “What happens to one person …”

We all finish the second line together. “Happens to all people.”

Mrs. Loewenthal is the first to stand to leave. “I like that, Octobia May.”

They all do.

One by one, they kiss my forehead and sit dimes on my dresser. “A girl has always got to have a little something saved up for herself,” Mrs. Ruby says. She tucks her arm through Mrs. Loewenthal’s. With aching legs, they all waddle out like ducks.

Sitting by the window, I watch Bessie playing alone across the street. Free.