Jesse
Green

June 22, 2017

Even though she’s just off the bus in Harrison, Tex., with no one to meet her and nowhere to sleep, the young woman will not answer a reasonable question from a man who might be able to help. She is Georgette Thomas, looking for a place she and her little girl can lodge until her husband, who has been absent for six years, arrives as promised to join them. The man who might help, a judge with houses to rent, naturally insists on knowing more about the husband’s mysterious absence — this is, after all, 1950, when a woman alone raises questions and eyebrows. “Don’t keep asking me where he’s been, Mr. Judge,” Georgette says uncomfortably. “I can’t tell you that.”