Stay Sweet(68)

I just about sprinted home to Daddy and found him on the porch with his pipe.

He’s been so down lately. He’s struggling with all the work, and the dairy is barely breaking even. He tries to hide it from Mother, but I can see it on him. When I told him about the benefit, he was so proud of me. And he laughed harder than he has maybe all summer when I told him how I raised the prices by another fifty cents for the last ten dishes.

He said the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

“Let me help you,” I said. And I told him my plan. That I could sell ice cream at our farm stand. I could bring in money, money we need, using the milk and cream we aren’t selling.

“Could you really churn that much in that little bucket of yours?” he asked me.

“No, but I can get a machine for eight hundred dollars,” I told him. “It’ll churn faster than I ever could. I could make way more, and have more control over it too.”

I saw an ad for them in one of Daddy’s dairy catalogues, and spent more than an hour on the phone with one of the Emery Thompson salesmen, asking him all sorts of questions.

Right away, Daddy said we don’t have that kind of money. I told him we do, because that’s the budget for my wedding. I overheard Mother say so to Mrs. Duluth two weeks ago.

Mother must have been eavesdropping, because she pushed outside in her nightgown and said absolutely not and she forbade me to use my wedding money for anything other than marrying Wayne.

Daddy explained that this was the first he was hearing about it and he hadn’t made a decision yet one way or the other. I let them go back and forth for a while before I finally put my foot down and said if they didn’t let me do this, I would refuse to marry Wayne, I’d become an old spinster and never give them any beautiful grandchildren (?Tiggy’s idea of a last-ditch threat)!

And that was the end of that.

Now I’m in bed, too excited to sleep. It seems almost sinful to be this lucky. So on Sunday, I’m going to put a little something extra in the collection plate and pray a few more rosaries than I normally do. That way, God will know how very grateful I am.

Near the end of the evening, a little before eleven, Amelia has four gallons of strawberry, chocolate, and vanilla completed, as well as several bases of Home Sweet Home steeping. They’ll be ready to put through the machine tomorrow morning.

She goes upstairs to see if Grady can give her a ride down to the stand with the new stock. It’s been quiet, and she wonders if she’s going to catch him asleep on the couch. She actually hopes she will, just to scare him, because it will be funny.

But Grady isn’t asleep. He’s on the floor, with his back up against the couch, his mother’s letters spread out in front of him.

Amelia tiptoes backward, but he looks up. “Hey.”

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to disturb you.”

“No, you’re not.” He beckons her closer. She sits next to him, leans against him.

He has opened every one.

“I was so little when she died,” he tells her. “I don’t have that many memories of her beyond that summer I spent with her here. It’s been nice learning about her, in her own voice.”

“Tell me.”

He does, pointing out some small thing in each and every letter: his mother’s terrific penmanship, how she was funny, quick to make a joke, smart. There’s never a clunky sentence, or a half-formed thought.

Also, she loved her son. Every letter had some proud mention of him—how alert he was as a baby, how early he started to walk, how much he enjoyed being read to at night.

“And I was going to throw these away,” he says, almost in disbelief.

Grady’s mother also dropped plenty of delicate hints of tension in her marriage to Grady’s father, mentioning how hard he worked, how his desire for success often left her and Grady in the shadows. She made excuses as to why plans to visit Molly evaporated for one reason or another—a new acquisition, a meeting that couldn’t be rescheduled. He wanted to give his family the world, provide for them, but it came at a cost.

“I’m nineteen years old. And do you know I’ve barely had one conversation with my dad about my mom? Like, how screwed up is that?”

“It doesn’t sound like he made it easy on you.”

“Oh, he definitely didn’t. Talking about my mom made him uncomfortable, but that shouldn’t have stopped me from doing it. My stepmom wouldn’t have cared. For a while, she was the one who’d remind me when it was my mom’s birthday.” Amelia can see the anger building in him, a little pulsing vein in his neck, fire reddening his cheeks.

He picks up a letter. “He knew my mom was sick when she and I came to Meade Creamery that summer before she died. I thought he didn’t. I thought he found out after and that’s why he couldn’t come with us.”

“Oh, Grady. I’m sorry.”

“I mean, does he regret that? Knowing his wife was sick and not being with her? Not stepping away from work?”

“You could talk about it with him. Tell him what you found. It might start to change things between you and your dad.”

“Maybe,” he says, gathering up the letters, though Amelia isn’t sure he believes it.

Amelia gets a text. It’s Cate.

Are you working late?

No.