by Gwen Florio
Nora heard the thump of Penelope’s walker before her mother appeared. She grabbed the kettle, simmering on the stove, and poured the water over the leaves in the pot.
‘Good heavens. What’s happening? Are you baking something? You aren’t seriously thinking of turning on the oven, are you? It’s supposed to be ninety-eight degrees today.’
Nora set pot and cup on the table. ‘It’s more bearable now than it will be later. I’m baking a cake to bring to Miss Grace. Any other time of year I’d have done a casserole, but that’s the last thing anyone wants to eat in this heat.’
She’d come up with the idea of the cake minutes after hanging up on the Sun reporter. Combine the twinned speed of the internet with small-town gossip and everyone in town would know what she’d seen the night Robert was shot – even though she hadn’t really seen anything – and attribute all manner of motives.
Nora needed to put a stop to it but could hardly stand in the middle of Commerce Street shouting, ‘It’s not what you think!’ She needed an ally, someone in the black community who could vouch for her character, and who better than Grace, who’d known her since childhood, and had the unassailable credentials as the dead youth’s aunt?
Hence, the cake: the perfect excuse to approach Grace. After all, it’s what one did after a death.
Penelope unfolded her napkin, flapped it in front of her face in a forlorn attempt to rearrange the air’s molecules into a semblance of coolness, and poured tea. She looked better than she had in the last few days, Nora thought. Some color in her cheeks. Or maybe it was just the heat.
‘What kind of cake?’
‘Peach. They had just-ripe ones in town. I got extra so we could have some on ice cream tonight.’
The peaches were piled high in a basket on the counter, next to the cutting board and a paring knife, the fuzz aglow in the shaft of sunlight through the window over the sink.
‘I should have known. I could smell them as soon as I walked in. Lovely. Nothing says summer like a ripe peach.’
‘End of summer,’ Nora reminded her. To her, peaches had always embodied both sadness and promise, ripening as they did midway through summer, reaching their peak in August, when the days were already growing almost imperceptibly shorter, and mornings – no matter how oppressive the heat of the coming day – teased with hints of cool. They held within them the knowledge of the end of the carefree indolence of childhood as well as the guarantee of the approaching autumn, the crisp air stirring somnolent senses alive again.
‘A peach cake to Grace. Talk about coals to Newcastle.’
‘She taught me how to make it. I used to make one every so often in Denver. They had peaches from the West Slope in Colorado. Not as good as ours, but you didn’t dare say that there. And it goes without saying my cake was never as good as hers, especially out there, where the altitude played hell – sorry – with my baking. But I like to think it came close. We’ll see how this one comes out.’
Grace hadn’t exactly taught her. As a girl, Nora had hovered so insistently whenever Grace was baking that she’d finally barked at Nora to sit on a chair without moving, and then had narrated, as though to herself, the steps to a perfect peach cake. She addressed Nora directly only once, turning to face her to import the seriousness of her message: ‘Don’t even think about putting cinnamon on this. Perfect peaches are their own glory.’
‘She would have picked the recipe up when she lived in Baltimore,’ Penelope said. ‘Those old German bakeries used to sell them.’
Nora stirred sugar into warm milk in a small bowl and sprinkled yeast on to it, then whisked together flour, salt and more sugar while she waited for the yeast mixture to prove. ‘I never knew she’d lived there.’
Leaving it open-ended, wondering if her mother would add to Emily Beattie’s sparse account. Besides, it was true. To her, Grace was as much a part of Chateau as the Colonial-era homes, the meandering river, the ever-closer creeping marshes and, yes, the peach trees that lingered in people’s yards, remnants of orchards that once supplied Baltimore with the makings of its famous cake.
Penelope stirred her tea, the spoon tink-tinking against the china.
‘She was there for a few years.’
Tink-tink.
‘Her brother went to college there. The whole family went with him.’
Tink.
‘She came back here after he … died. Oh! Oh, no!’ She shoved away from the table, nearly toppling her chair in her haste to escape the shards of china, the splash of lukewarm tea.
Nora rushed to her side with a towel. ‘It’s OK, Mother. I’ve got it. Look, there’s hardly any mess. You’d already drunk most of the tea.’
Penelope pointed to the floor with a shaking finger. ‘But … Michael Murphy. He’ll cut his feet.’
Nora stooped and ran the towel across the floor. ‘There’s only a couple of pieces. Most of them are on the table. It’s fine. Really.’
‘No.’ Penelope shook her head so hard that wisps of hair escaped her loose chignon. ‘It’s not all right. That was my great-grandmother’s china. Now the set is incomplete. It’s just one more thing gone wrong this summer. My leg. A mouse. This heat that just refuses to break. That child being shot. Alden Tydings the one who shot him. It feels like things are falling apart all over again.’
Nora balled the towel around the bits of china and stared at her mother. It wasn’t like Penelope to complain.
‘It’s the heat, Mother. It makes everything worse. You sit back. I’ll make you more tea. I know you don’t like iced, but today it’ll help. I’ll put in lemon, a little sugar. Or better yet, I’ll crush up some mint.’ It grew wild amid the flower beds, escaping from a long-ago herb garden and insinuating itself among the showier blooms.
‘No, thank you.’ Penelope reached for her walker, pulled it close and hoisted herself from the table. ‘It’s too hot in here. I’m going to sit out on the patio while there’s still some shade. Once the sun hits those bricks, it turns into an oven. Of course, you might not remember. You’re only out there in the mornings these days.’
Message delivered, she thumped her way back down the hall, leaving her daughter to contemplate the fact that she’d been seen tiptoeing across the patio and over the grass at dawn, down to the dock, a view perfectly framed by Penelope’s bedroom window, as was the river and anybody who might happen to be rowing a boat along it.
‘Hell.’ Nora looked at the yeast mixture, frothing higher than she’d ever remembered, bubbles swelling and popping on its surface. She wondered if she’d let it prove too long, and decided, given Grace’s exacting standards, it wasn’t worth taking a chance. She threw it away, washed the bowl, and started again.
She selected a peach from the basket while she waited, slitting the skin with her thumbnail. Juice ran in sweet rivulets across her hand and down her wrist. She chased it with her tongue and bit into the fruit, trying to suck what sweetness she could from a day that held every indication of going sour.
Grace Evans lived in Chateau’s black neighborhood, not in the ramshackle rental houses hard by the street that even in Nora’s childhood had largely been the only places available to black people, but farther back in a small, tree-shaded neighborhood of neat bungalows built when a lawsuit finally forced banks to change their mortgage policies.
Nora wondered whether she might find a crowd, but the street was quiet when she arrived, and Grace herself sat alone and unmoving on a green porch glider. Nora waited for her to pat the place beside her, or even nod to one of the wicker chairs, but Grace did neither, so Nora stood on the porch step in full sun, the cake pan balanced on her palms.
‘It’s a peach cake. I made it like you taught me,’ she said by way of greeting. ‘No cinnamon, no glaze.’
‘Cinnamon,’ Miss Grace murmured. ‘The color of that boy’s skin. Oh, he was beautiful.’
Nora tried to remember the photos of Robert that had run with the most recent stories; blurry, most of them, taken from social media
postings, precise skin shade indeterminate. She’d glimpsed him twice in passing on the road, once when he’d tossed the unspoken apology her way and again when she passed the traffic stop, his head angled down in the universal posture of frustration and unhappiness naturally part of any such encounter.
‘I couldn’t tell,’ she murmured.
‘Excuse me?’ The sharp tone Nora remembered, demanding a straight answer.
‘I saw him that night.’ Which Grace knew. There had, after all, been that story in the Afro. It had quoted Grace. But the Afro was only delivered in Baltimore and Washington. Maybe Grace hadn’t yet read the online version; was no more adept with a smartphone than Nora’s mother.
‘He drove by me on Route Fifty. Almost cut me off – to be fair, I was going too slowly. And then, just outside town, I saw him pulled over by—’ A cop, she started to say. But Grace knew it was Alden. ‘I didn’t know who it was when I drove by.’
She feared Grace’s anger at even the choked-off mention of Alden, but her face had gone soft, almost tearful.
‘How did he seem?’
Nora thought back to those two quick-as-a-flash glances – the first as he passed her, the second as he sat in his idling car by the side of the road, lights flashing red and blue across his green car. The rigidity in his shoulders and jaw.
‘Pissed,’ she said. ‘He looked pissed.’ Then remembered where she was, to whom she was speaking. ‘Excuse me, ma’am. Upset.’
Grace almost smiled. ‘He would be. Should be. Everybody knows about that speed trap. Robert grew up in Baltimore, but he used to spend summers down here with me.’
She shifted an inch, toward the glider’s arm. Nora took it as an invitation and joined her on the glider, resting the still-warm cake pan on her lap.
‘What was that like, those summers?’
Once she’d gotten over the worst of her heartbreak, she’d luxuriated in the move to Colorado, the escape from Chateau’s stultifying slow rhythms, the impossibility of going anywhere without recognizing nearly every single face and the nods of recognition in return; every remark freighted with history-laden judgment.
Only more recently had she felt a different sort of tug, urging her back instead of forward, into the solace of familiarity. The reflexive Southern politeness, no matter its often-surface quality, that eased initial encounters. The careless scattering of ‘honeys’ and ‘dears’ and ‘childs.’ Anonymity was freeing, but it was also cold as hell. But Robert had never had time to figure that out and now he never would.
‘He’d been coming down here so many years he had friends. So that helped. And, of course, as he got older, there was that phone. Face always in it, just like every other child, and adult, too. But he was such a help to me. Mowed my grass, pruned my trees, cleaned my windows, drove me places.’
Heat rose in Nora’s face, defeating the porch’s deep shade. For all the work Grace did around Quail House, it had never occurred to Nora that she might need help caring for her own home.
‘I’m so sorry,’ Nora said. ‘I didn’t know what else to do. So I made a cake.’ Then blushed still harder at the clumsiness of the statement.
But Grace nodded. ‘We none of us know what to do. You want to think things have changed, even though you know better. But it’s human nature. Life goes along and you think, well, maybe. Maybe things truly are getting better. Maybe you can relax. And then this happens and you realize that what you knew all along is true. That nothing has changed. Not one blessed thing.’
‘But surely some things are better?’
The glider lurched with the violence of Grace’s rising. Nora grabbed the arm for balance. Grace took the cake from her lap and carried it into the kitchen. Nora followed, wondering how to bring up Alden.
Bouquets of flowers covered Grace’s kitchen counter, nearly obscuring a sweating pitcher of lemonade, a puddle of water spreading slowly from its base. Mint leaves sailed on its surface between bobbing floes of ice cubes. A kitchen fan revolved lazily overhead, creaking with each revolution.
Nora looked longingly toward the lemonade, but Grace gestured toward the table without offering any.
Nora took a seat. The flowers drooped on their stems, their petals going brown and crisp about the edges. A vase of lilies sat in the center of the table. Nora particularly detested lilies, their petals like waxen scythes, their cloying scent. Her eyes watered. She hoped she wouldn’t sneeze. Grace positioned herself across from Nora, her face hidden by the bouquet.
‘I never knew about your brother,’ Nora blurted. ‘No one ever told me.’
Grace was quiet for a long time. Every revolution of the fan pushed the scent of the lilies into Nora’s face.
‘What happened back then?’ The same question she’d posed to Emily Beattie in the library. But the longer she could sit and talk with Grace, re-establish some sort of rapport, the better. She remembered her manners, something that always counted with Grace. ‘That is, if you don’t mind talking about it.’
‘You don’t even know. And you, growing up right here in town. That’s a crime.’
‘Yes. Which is why I’m asking.’
The silence went on so long that she stirred in her chair, preparing to go. Grace wasn’t going to tell her anything, and she was too cowardly to bring up the subject of Alden. But maybe when the Sun got hold of the same ancient prom photo that the Afro had unearthed and called Grace for comment, she would mention that Nora had brought her a cake. Grace’s musing voice, speaking almost as though to herself, interrupted her self-serving fantasy.
‘Some people came down here from Baltimore to help organize for civil rights. You’d have thought Chateau was Mississippi then. You didn’t have those “Colored Only” signs here, but that’s only because nobody needed them. Everybody knew the way things were. Still are,’ she muttered, almost as an afterthought.
Nora wanted to protest – the black cop! Black and white people together in the coffee shop! – but thought better of it.
‘My brother was one of the organizers. But the night before a big march, he got shot. Things got out of hand. Same thing happened here as happened everywhere else. Windows broken, fires set. Except the fires on the white side of town got put out. The fire at our church didn’t. They said it was too dangerous’ – sarcasm sliced through her words – ‘to come over to this side of town because of the shooting. But there was only one shooting and it didn’t even happen over here. They blamed it on us anyway, same as the church fire. Why would we burn our own church? Or shoot our own? But that’s exactly what your grandfather did. You really want to know what happened back then? You should talk with your mother.’
She rose, finally, to pour lemonade. Nora swallowed, imagining the cool tartness hitting the back of her throat. Somewhere on the counter, amid the forest of bouquets, a ding sounded. Grace moved a couple of the bouquets aside and found a phone, holding it close to her face to read the message. Nora’s stomach lurched. So much for hoping that Grace and her mother were the last two people on earth not spending their days online.
Grace whirled to face Nora, her face contorted.
‘Why’d you come here? You’ve got some nerve. Acting like you want to know. Trying to get something on us when there’s nothing to get. What are you trying to do? Help them blame things on us all over again?’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Running around with him again, just like when you were a girl. But he’s married now. Is that how you people do? Go after men you can’t have? Just like … just … just …’ She doubled over, sucking in air.
‘First Bobby. Now Robert.’ She straightened. ‘Who else are you trying to take from me? My parents died a long time ago. My little brother Kwame – Robert’s father – is all I got left. You gonna take him next? I told him it’s like he’s walking around with a big target on his back, but he didn’t believe me. He will once he sees this.’
She thrust her phone in Nora’s face.
Nora stood and backed away
, suppressing an urge to run. Whatever was on that phone, she didn’t need to see it.
But Grace advanced upon her, holding up the phone insistently. ‘Bad enough what I read in the Afro. That road-rage bullshit you told the police. Can’t believe you had the nerve to show up here after spewing that stinking sewage about my grandbaby. I let you in because I wanted to hear what you were about. See if you would own it. Well, now I know. You think you could sneak around, help him out, and nobody know what you were up to. The whole world’s going to know now. You are radioactive. Look. Look.’
Nora blinked and focused on the screen, the tiny montage of images, taken from a distance, but still unmistakably recognizable as her and Alden in the boat. She puzzled over it, then remembered the woman on the bridge, the way she’d raised her hand. Nora had thought she was waving. Now she realized the woman must have been holding a phone.
The photo she’d taken that day, now enlarged and blurry, was displayed prominently on a site named Justice for Robert Evans. It bore a damning caption: Killer Cop Has a Side Piece.
‘Go home, Nora.’ No Miss Nora as in days of old. ‘Go home and look yourself in the eye. Ask your mother. Talk with her about what happened back in the day. Ask her who killed my brother. Because if anyone knows, she does. Being her daddy’s daughter and all. Then come back and tell me how things have changed.’
The door slammed behind her, followed by a metallic clink and then a dull thump – the unmistakable sound of a firm foot on the pedal of a metal trash can just before a peach cake landed hard in its depths.
NINETEEN
1967
‘Nothing has changed in that godforsaken place. Nothing. Never has, never will. And you think you’re the one to do it? Lord help me for raising a goddamn fool.’