At the jail when they said good-bye she clung to Daddy and so did Mama but that cop pulled him away and forced him from the room. She could see Daddy’s anger, she knew he wanted to fight them but what good would it do? They’d hardly had time to hug each other and then he was gone, was marched away down the hall. He glanced back once, then she and Mama were alone. Everything was empty, the whole world empty. She felt Misto’s warmth against her cheek, but now even her loving cat couldn’t help.
“You know we’ll visit him at the prison,” Mama said. “They have visiting hours, we’ll be with him then.”
“In a cage,” Sammie said. “We can’t be with him at home. We have to visit Daddy, like a stranger in a cage.”
Another cop walked them out to the front door. They crossed the parking lot, got in their car and sat holding each other. Mama tried to stop crying but she couldn’t. Sammie pressed so close that when Mama started the car she could hardly drive; she drove one-handed, her arm tight around Sammie. Sammie was nine but she felt like a tiny child, pressing her face against Mama. Now, without Daddy, they weren’t a family, they needed to be together to be a real family. When Daddy went overseas, when she was little, he told her he was going to fight for freedom. Freedom for their world, he said. Freedom for their country and for every person in it. But instead of freedom for all, like the history books said, those people in the federal court and even their own neighbors had stolen her daddy’s freedom from him, and Daddy had done nothing wrong.
Ever since the trial began, she and Mama had stayed with Grandma, and Sammie had been with Grandma every day. Mama didn’t want her in school, when Brad Falon with the narrow eyes might still be in town, might follow her. And where the kids would bully her and say her daddy was guilty.
During the trial Grandma had gone right on running her baking business; she said the money she made was even more important now, and you couldn’t just tell longtime customers there would be no more pies and cakes until the trial was over. Grandma said that would lose all her good customers and she had already lost some of them because of what people thought Daddy had done. Grandma was up every morning at three; the smell of baking always woke Sammie. A lady came in to help her, and once the cakes and pies and bread were out and cooling they would stop long enough to make breakfast, but Sammie could never eat very much. Later when the cakes were iced and everything was boxed and ready, Sammie would ride with Grandma in the van to deliver them to the local restaurants. And every night, during the trial, Misto was with her.
Now, after saying good-bye to Daddy they came in the house, through the closed-in porch, and straight into Grandma Caroline’s arms. They stood in the middle of the living room clinging together hugging each other, needing each other, hurting and lost.
The whole house smelled of sausage biscuits. In the kitchen, Grandma had already poured a cup of hot tea for Mama and milk for Sammie. Grandma always wore jeans, and this morning a faded plaid shirt covered by a bright apron of patchwork, one of the aprons she liked to sew late at night when she couldn’t sleep. She must be awake a lot because she sure had a lot of aprons, all as bright as picture books.
CAROLINE TANNER WORE no makeup, her high coloring and short, dark hair needing no enhancement. She set a tray of sausage biscuits on the table beside a strawberry shortcake. Comfort food, Becky thought, watching her mother, never ceasing to wonder at her calm strength. Becky had been seven when her father was killed in a tractor accident. Two weeks after the funeral Caroline began baking and selling her goods. She was a Rome girl, and the town had given her its support. They had lived on what she made, Becky and her two brothers helping all they could.
Becky was ten, her brother Ron twelve and James fifteen when Caroline got a loan from the bank and extended the kitchen of their little house into a bigger and more efficient bakery and storeroom. Becky and her brothers had helped the carpenter after school and on weekends, as he built and dried in the new walls, then tore out the original walls. The children had learned how to paint properly, how to clean their tools, and her brothers had learned how to plaster. After the stainless steel counters were installed, and the two big commercial refrigerators and two sinks, they had taken the bakery van into Atlanta and brought home the new ovens, the big stovetop, and the smaller commercial appliances. The big window over the sink looked out on the side yard beneath a pair of live oak trees.
Before the remodel, Caroline had done all her baking in their small, inadequate kitchen, her equipment and trays of baked goods spilling over into the dining room, where cookies and breads and cakes cooled on racks, along with those already boxed and ready for delivery. The two iceboxes never had enough space for the salads and casseroles for the parties that Caroline catered. Their own simple meals had been eaten in the living room, worked around the urgent business of making a living. When the new bakery was finished, they’d had a little party, just the four of them, to celebrate the new and more accommodating kitchen, to reclaim their own house.
Within three years Caroline had paid off the van and equipment and could hire more help for the catered weddings and parties, though still, the whole family pitched in for those. All the years Becky was growing up, her mother would be out of bed and dressed by three in the morning, rolling out pie crusts, baking cakes. Becky’s brothers made breakfast until Becky was old enough to cook. Her brothers, as soon as they could drive legally, had done the bakery deliveries before school.
Becky missed her brothers. Even after Ron was killed in the Pacific, she still felt often that he was near her. And though their older brother, James, was still in Japan he was close to them, he liked to write home of that very different part of the world. She looked forward to his return next year when his tour of duty ended.
By the time Becky turned sixteen and got her driver’s license, her brothers had moved on with their lives. She had felt very grown-up, handling the deliveries herself, before and after school. She had helped with them after she and Morgan were married, until Sammie was born. Even during the war years Caroline made an adequate living, using special recipes that took little of the precious rationed sugar but were still delicious.
Now, at forty-eight, Caroline was as energetic and slim as ever, a tall, strong woman whom Becky, at this time in her life, deeply envied. She wished she had half her mother’s resilience, wished she could follow better Caroline’s hardheaded approach to life. Caroline Tanner had always tackled problems head-on, stubbornly weighing each possible solution, choosing the most viable one, then plunging ahead with no holds barred. If Caroline had tears during those hard years, she cried them in private.
They were halfway through supper when Caroline said, “The next thing is to go for an appeal. You need a better lawyer.” She looked steadily at Becky. “I plan to help with his fees. I want Falon taken down, I want to see him in prison. I want Morgan out of that place.”
“Mama, I don’t—”
“It’s family money. Half of it will be yours one day and you need it now. If it bothers you to take it, you can pay me back after Morgan gets out.”