Free Everyday People by Stewart O’Nan

time ago.”
    â€œOh yeah?” Vanessa said, and he started telling her about it—the pool and the other students and the smell of chlorine, and suddenly Vanessa wondered if he was older than Miss Fisk. He was white, so it didn’t matter, but she wondered. She couldn’t imagine him swimming, leaving the gym in winter with his hair still wet. He had this whole life behind him she knew nothing about. A family, a history. She would never know it, she thought, and now she wanted to. He was sharper than Miss Fisk, who sometimes forgot what she was saying. Vanessa would have to ask her just the right questions.
    â€œWell,” Tony said, “I got a lot more stops,” and waved good-bye to Rashaan. “Study hard.”
    â€œI will,” Vanessa said.
    She did that night, staying up with the news to cut down her list of questions. At work she added some of the old ones in again, and came up with some new ones, so that when she sat down with Miss Fisk late that afternoon she had more than when she started.
    Miss Fisk was ready for her, a leather-bound photo album laid out on the coffee table. She’d made a pitcher of lemonade and a plate of gingersnaps. The lemonade was fine, but when Vanessa bit into one of the cookies she realized that some ingredient was missing. She covered her surprise by taking a big sip.
    â€œLet me make sure this is working,” she said, and turned on the recorder. “All right, the first question I’d like to ask you is about your family.”
    â€œMm-hmm.”
    â€œYour mother, what was she like?”
    Miss Fisk rocked back like she was thinking. She closed her eyes and then opened them again, smiling as if proud that she’d remembered the answer. “My mother was from Carolina. Columbia, South Carolina. Her grandmother on her mother’s side was a slave and her grandfather was a sharecropper. After the Surrender they set up their own place outside Decatur, Georgia. That’s where one of the big slave markets was, in Decatur. That’s where they met.”
    Vanessa checked to make sure the tape was running. Once Miss Fisk got going, she tried not to interrupt. Miss Fisk was saying exactly what they’d been talking about in class—how her great-grandparents had been burned out by the Klan and headed north, chopping cotton for traveling money, how her grandfather was the first man in the family who could read. Everything they did seemed heroic, an endless struggle, and Vanessa thought of how exhausted she was, how she counted on the fact that there was just one more day till the weekend. In a way it didn’t seem real to Vanessa, all this history. It was strange what you didn’t know about a person, like last night with Tony—all the things behind them.
    â€œNow my father,” Miss Fisk was saying, “was just like your daddy. Talk? He could talk a cat into a bath. I have never heard a one of those so-called preachers spill it the way those two could. Didn’t they know it too. They’d go on for hours right there on that porch. You could come in and cook dinner and go out and they’d still be bumping their gums.”
    It couldn’t be right, Vanessa thought. Her father was just a boy when Mr. Fisk died. Miss Fisk noticed her reaction and paused, just a second, as if trying to figure out what she’d said. She shook it off, leaning back and remembering again.
    â€œYes indeed. And talk about handsome. My Lord that man was sharp. When he dressed for church, the whole street would turn out just to look at him.”
    Vanessa wanted to stop her, to ask her if it was a mistake, but she was off in another direction. She didn’t mention him again, and she didn’t say anything about Bean, but Vanessa expected that. Maybe the older history was, the easier it was to talk about.
    She mentioned it to her mother that night while she was working on her report. She brought the recorder into her bedroom