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  “Your face did. Now, c’mon, pumpkin, what’s going on?”

  Gloria felt relieved. If Grandma knew anything about today’s incident on Main Street, she would have said so.

  “Tell Grandma what’s wrong.”

  Gloria looked at her grandmother’s kind face and wished she didn’t have to go through with this. But there was no point in stalling. “Sam Hidel called this afternoon. He’s cutting you off—no more charging your groceries.”

  “Now, why would he go and do a thing like that?”

  “Because Mother …” Gloria stopped. Grandma was a proud woman in her own way, and Gloria didn’t want her to know she had been paying her grocery bills. This afternoon, Sam had called and told Gloria that Geri Bickford had found out about their arrangement—and said if he didn’t close Grandma Quinn’s account, she’d make such a ruckus they’d hear it all the way to Eckerd City. “Because Mother made him,” Gloria said, simply.

  Grandma sucked her cheeks inward, then let out a sigh. “Oh, that Geraldine. Honestly. You’d think she’d have better things to do with her time.”

  “Can you manage without it? I mean, can you afford to buy your groceries out of pocket?”

  “Of course I can. It’s the baking goods that are the problem. Seems I need more and more every week.”

  Gloria shook her head. “Grandma, you’re just going to have to stop doing all this baking.”

  “In a pig’s eye!”

  “Then cut it in half. Just bake every other day.”

  “That won’t work either.” Grandma pinched her lips together, indicating that in her mind, the matter was settled.

  “You’ve got to be reasonable.” Gloria pushed her plate away. “You’ve got to understand that Sam Hidel has cut you off. Without credit, how are you going to continue all this?” Gloria’s head jerked in the direction of the cookie tray on the stove.

  “I’ll manage.”

  “You’re usually not so stubborn unless you think it’s important. So why are you making such a fuss about wanting to bake cookies every day?”

  “I don’t bake every day. Don’t need to. Just when …”

  “Just when what?”

  “Just when there’s a birthday at the elementary school.”

  “You bake every time there’s a birthday?”

  “No. Just when it’s for one of the kids who wouldn’t be bringing in any cookies from home. And there’s plenty that fall in that category, believe me. Mostly migrant kids, but there’s others too, like little Bessie Johnson, whose daddy’s been laid up for six weeks with a broken leg. When there’s no money coming in, things like birthdays and cookies just go by the wayside. Still, how do you think these little ones feel, seeing all the other kids bringing in cupcakes and whatnot when it’s their birthday? Not good, I can tell you. But the teachers give me the names of the kids they think might not have any goodies on their special day, and I make sure I bake up a nice batch of something for them.”

  “How is it that nobody’s heard about this? In Appleton people know when you pick your teeth, for goodness’ sake!”

  Grandma Quinn smiled. “Oh, that was part of the deal. I swore all the teachers to secrecy. No need for everyone to know the kids whose parents can’t afford to even send in some cookies. That could embarrass the little ones, their parents too. And all the teachers agreed. When they need cookies, they call me in advance and come the night before, sometimes that morning, to pick them up. Then they hand them out, with nobody the wiser. And privately, the teachers tell the birthday child that someone made the cookies special just for him, and that does it. Sometimes the teachers tell me the kids cry with gratitude. Can you imagine crying over a few cookies? Tells you how important it is to those little ones. Now, I ask you, how can I give that up? How can I stop my baking?”

  Gloria leaned over and kissed her grandmother on the forehead. “You can’t, Grandma; you can’t.” Somehow she’d find a way to give Grandma the extra money she needed.

  “I knew you’d understand,” Grandma patted her chubby hands together as though ridding them of excess flour, or maybe as a sign that the matter was settled to both their satisfactions. “Now, we’ll just have to explain all this to Geraldine.”

  “I don’t know, Grandma …” Somehow, Gloria couldn’t picture her mother understanding any of this.

  “Your mother’s not as unreasonable as you think. Sure, she can be like one of those whales I’ve seen on the Discovery channel—blowing up a tall spout around her, making a big splash, looming in your face when she should be invisible. But pumpkin, she loves you, and when all is said and done, she loves me too.”

  Gloria broke off a piece of cookie and popped it into her mouth. It was delicious—so crunchy and chocolatey—but she was too disturbed by what Grandma had just said to tell her so. “I’d like to believe that, Grandma, but most of the time I think Mother is just disappointed in me. And sometimes … sometimes I don’t think she loves me at all. And look how mean she’s been to you all these years.”

  Grandma Quinn rose from her chair and walked to the stove. With stooped shoulders she began transferring the remaining cookies on the baking sheet to a wire cooling rack. Then suddenly, she put the spatula down and turned. “I’m gonna tell you something I should a told you years ago.” Grandma walked across the linoleum as though it were a crate of eggs, then began wiping her hands hard on the apron tied around her waist like she was trying to remove a stain.

  The action troubled Gloria.

  “I’m gonna tell you the truth about Geraldine. I already told you when she was young and realized how beautiful she was, that knowledge turned her head clear around. Made her start thinking wrong. Wrong thinking gets you every time. Makes you go in directions you shouldn’t. The idea came to her, sudden-like. She just woke up one morning with the notion she was gonna be Miss America someday. After a while, she had everyone else believing it too. She won Miss Apple Festival hands down. I should have stopped her then and there because I knew Geraldine didn’t have the strength of character to handle any measure of success, but I didn’t. I let her go on and enter every beauty contest in the state.”

  Grandma Quinn stood rubbing her hands so hard, Pontius Pilate fashion, Gloria thought she would make them bleed. “Truth was, I was proud. Proud that I had such a pretty daughter. It sort of gave me some measure of importance, in a roundabout way. ’Course, that was before I got to know Jesus. He would have set me straight on that one, for sure. Anyway, beautiful women attract all sorts of men.”

  Gloria thought of Jenny Hobart and how her looks had brought Jenny such problems in Eckerd City.

  “And when beautiful women are silly and vain, well … you can see how they would fall prey to silly and vain men as well.”

  Gloria stiffened. “You’re … not talking about Dad, are you?” She wondered if her voice sounded as pleading to Grandma’s ears as to hers.

  “Actually, pumpkin, I am. Now don’t you go looking at me like I just drowned a whole litter of kittens. You hear me out. What you and your daddy had was one thing. He loved you; that’s for sure. No one can say differently. But what he and your mother had was another matter entirely.”

  Gloria remembered all the times she and her father had played catch in the backyard, their fishing and biking trips, the countless times he’d bring her small surprises from the bakery. But she had no memory of her mother and father doing these things. She only remembered how Mother was always nagging him about one thing or another. Gloria had resented her mother for that. Perhaps resented her even now. But here Grandma was saying that something had been wrong with Dad. How could that be? She stuffed the rest of the cookie down her throat, trying to work up the courage to ask.

  But Grandma didn’t wait. “No use trying to make a girl knock her father off the pedestal she’s put him on. That’s like asking a person to perform surgery on his own heart. But you gotta get over this notion that your mother just popped out of a pod somewhere, fully grown, fully disagreeab
le. Things happen that can sour people, sour them like a vat of pickles. And without Jesus, people sour easily. Those people need extra kindness. Maybe some extra understanding.”

  “What … happened?” Gloria forced herself to say.

  “Your father was a womanizer. All shapes, all sizes, all colors, all ages. Except not too young. Especially after you were born. Maybe the thought of someone, someday, doing to his daughter what he was doing to someone else’s kept him from the young ones.”

  “I don’t believe it! I would have heard about it. It would have been the gossip of Appleton.”

  “It was, before you were born. But things died down. That’s because your father stopped having his flings with the locals. He’d go out of town for weeks at a time. ‘Business trips’ he’d call them, but Geraldine knew what he was up to. Land sakes, women called the house all the time looking for your daddy. I don’t think a man could do a woman more hurt than to cheat on her. It nearly destroyed Geraldine. Took the heart right out of her.”

  “Why did she stay with him?”

  “Ahhh …” Grandma Quinn began rubbing her hands again, and Gloria had to stop herself from jumping up and physically restraining her. “That’s where I come in.” Slowly, she eased herself onto a chair. “Sin’s a terrible thing. Sometimes you commit it without understanding why. And sometimes it can be so subtle, like the ticking of the clock on a mantel; you hardly know it’s there. And it seems so right. Sin can be just like that, pumpkin. Subtle and seemingly good. But Jesus always exposes the fake things.”

  Gloria looked into her grandmother’s troubled eyes and saw sadness there. “Even when we’re forgiven, even when it’s been put under the blood, the residue of sin can be painful.” Grandma reached across the table and covered Gloria’s hand. “I remember the day like it was yesterday. It was raining, and your mother came dripping wet to the door with you, just a baby, in her arms. ‘I’ve got to leave him,’ she said. ‘He’s killing me.’ That’s when she asked me if she could move in with me and your grandpa. She didn’t think she could support the two of you all on her own. ‘What can an ex-beauty queen do for a living?’ she said. She was still beautiful, but she was right. Her former victories hadn’t produced a single cosmetic contract or any other work. And she only had a high school education, so what could she do? Work at Tad’s Ice Cream Parlor? Or Pearl Owens’s clothing store? Yes. But she wouldn’t make enough to have her own place.

  “Know what I told her? I told her to go back to her husband where she belonged. In those days, women didn’t leave their husbands like they do today. They stuck it out, made it work. So I sent her back to the man who kept breaking her heart, thinking I had done right, that I had kept a family together. But when I came to Jesus, He showed me a thing or two. He showed me I was more concerned about the disgrace of a divorce than about fixing a marriage. He showed me I didn’t want to have a divorcée for a daughter. I didn’t want to put up with the wagging tongues and all the uproar it would cause. Now, don’t get me wrong. God hates divorce. Says so right in His Word. But I was sending that child back into a situation she wasn’t equipped to deal with. I was sending a vain, silly child into a relationship with another vain, silly child. I didn’t offer the healing balm of Gilead, because I had none. What she needed was Jesus, and because I didn’t know Him and she didn’t know Him, she went back empty-handed and unable to cope with the years of unfaithfulness that followed. I often wonder if taking her in would have changed your daddy. Maybe if he had seen the consequences of his sin, had faced the prospect of losing his family, maybe he would have changed.

  “But there’s no denying it—in the end your daddy was an unhappy man. Once I actually had a chance to share Jesus with him, and he cried. Maybe he was like that prodigal, and he finally saw himself in a pigsty of his own making. I can’t say, ’cause he never came out and said anything, just cried … like a baby. That was right before he got cancer. He never seemed to have any fight left in him after that.”

  Gloria closed her eyes as she remembered the days of watching her father slip away in the hospital. Even the doctors had remarked that they had never seen anyone with his type of cancer go quite so quickly.

  “Oh, Grandma,” Gloria whispered. “Why do some people have to ruin themselves before they come to Jesus?”

  Chapter Fourteen

  USING HER KEY, Gloria let herself into the tidy house with the white picket fence, then walked down the hall toward the kitchen. When she noticed she was on tiptoe, she quickly flattened her feet. Old habits died hard. Mother never liked dirty footprints on her clean tiles, and Gloria had become accustomed to walking cautiously over them.

  She studied the kitchen. Spotless as usual. Nothing out of place. Except … a piece of paper lay on the gleaming white tile countertop. Mother never left anything out. Unless it was important and needed her attention. Gloria walked over and saw it was an application to the Clancy County Home for the Aged.

  All filled out and signed.

  Her stomach turned. Surely Mother couldn’t sign Grandma into a nursing home without Grandma’s consent. Could she? It was hard to imagine.

  “Mother!” Gloria shouted, even though she knew her mother despised shouting in the house. Where was her mother, anyway? The house was quiet. Gloria had called from Grandma Quinn’s to say she was coming. “Mother!”

  “Must you yell?”

  Gloria turned toward the voice and saw her mother standing behind her. She must have come from upstairs. She stood regal and perfect in her coordinated brown linen slacks and long-sleeved autumn-colored silk blouse. On her feet she wore cocoa-colored Jil Sander pumps. Mother prided herself in dressing appropriately for each season, and that meant no white shoes or white handbags before Easter or after Labor Day.

  Her hair was swept back in lovely waves and cupped her face, then ended at the nape of her neck in a brown net vaguely reminiscent of the ’40s. She wore a smile like a badge of courage, and Gloria knew it was forced. But the eyes were the giveaway, all puffy and red despite the perfect application of foundation and shadow cream and probably a drop or two of Visine.

  Mother had been crying.

  “When you called, you said you had something to discuss.” Her mother sounded defensive. She glanced at the white paper on the counter, then at Gloria, and visibly braced herself.

  “Sam Hidel phoned this afternoon and told me what you said.”

  “Well … you can hardly imagine my shock when I found out you were paying Grandma’s grocery bills!” Geri Bickford looked like a gladiator waiting for the first blow. To her credit, she turned fully toward Gloria. “I can’t have that, Gloria! I won’t have it!”

  “I know. And I’m sorry, Mother. I should have consulted you. I should have discussed it with you first. I was wrong. I embarrassed you, and I’m sorry. Truly sorry.”

  Geri stepped backward. Obviously, the blow had not been the kind she’d expected. “You … you can’t imagine the vicious talk that goes on. I’ve heard it all my life. One misstep, and there go the gossipmongers. Some people just live to spread dirt about others. They thrive on it.”

  “I know. It was a thoughtless thing to do.”

  “I’ve tried to do right, Gloria. I’ve tried to live a respectable life, bring you up properly. But when you do things like this, don’t you understand you open me up to ridicule? You can’t imagine what people are saying, but I can. They’re saying that I don’t care about my own mother, that she’s got to rely on you because she can’t rely on me.”

  Salty tears stung Gloria’s eyes as she crossed the distance between them and slowly put her arms around her mother. “I know, Mom. I know. It’s all right. Everything’s going to be all right.”

  As Gloria gave the final twist to the toothpaste cap and placed the tube back in the medicine cabinet, the phone rang. At this hour? Her toothbrush dangled between her teeth. Nobody called this late except her mother. She remembered her mother’s face after Gloria had hugged her. It was sweet and vulnerable
and … pained. Should she answer the phone? She thought for a second, then bent over the sink near the running faucet, withdrew her toothbrush, sucked in a handful of water and swished.

  Then she raced to the phone and managed to pick it up before the answering machine did. “Hello?”

  “Gloria, I just wanted to say … that is … I wanted to talk to you about Grandma.”

  “Okay, Mom, what is it?”

  “I was thinking … well … I was thinking that maybe I should drive over to that retirement community you mentioned a while back and check it out. Maybe there’s something suitable, something that’s just right for Grandma. It can’t hurt to look … I mean, before I send the paperwork to the Clancy County Home. You know, just in case. What do you think?”

  Gloria’s heart soared. “I think it’s a great idea.”

  “Would you … that is, do you think you’d like to come?”

  “Sure. Of course.”

  “How about Saturday?”

  “Saturday’s perfect.” Gloria bit the inside of her mouth to keep from shouting “hooray” into the phone. “And Mom, I found out why Grandma’s been buying all those baking supplies.” Gloria quickly told her mother what Grandma Quinn had shared. There was a long silence on the other end of the phone. “Mom?” No answer. It took Gloria several seconds to realize that the reason her mother didn’t answer was because she was crying.

  Cutter fumbled around in his desk drawer, trying to find where he had put that report on the Four-Towns General Hospital. They were the first ones using Medical Data’s new ER Writer, the software that enabled doctors to record exams, diagnoses, and treatments, then instantly integrate the information into the hospital’s Digital VAX multidepartment patient record. He was about to call Sadie Bellows but thought better of it. These days, he was keeping his distance. The way she stomped around the office and banged drawers and was generally disagreeable made Cutter sorry she still had another week left. Next Friday, Sadie would empty her desk. He had already put an ad in all the Four-Towns papers for a replacement and received twenty résumés. This afternoon he would be conducting the first interview.