On a picket line in 1995, I overheard one woman tell another, "Well, we're kind of like -- connected. We made a -- personal commitment, I guess you'd say, at the American Legion Hall on Romney Street." Without thinking, I turned to her and said I'd like to use that in a short story.

The next weekend, I wrote the first draft. From the beginning, I had in mind the kind of she-said/he-said relationship story that, when I was a teenager, used to make me fight with my sister for possession of the Ladies' Home Journal. I resolved to invent a woman and a man who inhabit the same world but experience it differently. I'd let the reader have both points of view. There'd be an ending that seems to resolve things, but doesn't really, because it leaves unreconciled the tension that is inherent when separate lives ostensibly come together. Later, someone told me it was nervy to shift point of view so many times in such a short piece, but I didn't know that when I was writing. I just did what seemed necessary.

So. A story driven by character is what I had in mind. But as I wrote it, I found that place began to take over. Charleston has a way of doing that. It started with the American Legion Hall on Romney Street, the magnet that first pulled me in. And then I found my characters in a laudromat and at wonderful, wonderful Woolworth's on King Street -- one of my favorite places, until it faded into history soon after I wrote the story.

Why Romney Street? Why King Street? Because in such places interesting things happen. While tourists crowd Charleston's Battery, stately museum houses, and fancy restaurants, they never know the living community that copes with Charleston's ambiguous history and struggles for its future.

Presenting the relationship between Joel and Hazel requires showing what is his, what is hers, and what is theirs. Their relationship is something separate to each of them, and also something shared. Hazel's and Joel's relationship with the city is equally complex, equally ambiguous -- and likewise a thing both separate and shared. As "outsiders," they both feel the tension between love for the community as it is, and commitment to change it in fundamental ways. And yet, in their distinct ways, they have also merged with the place. Living and working in the heart of the community, they become subject to its power. The place they want to change has begun to change them.