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hanging over yer shoulder,” he said, already heading across the yard. “Besides, I’ll be back long before Etta makes it home from her bridge game. Now you just get those berries picked, Allie my girl, and I’ll bring home some vanilla ice cream to eat ’em with.”
    He closed the back gate and Darby stood staring after him with his basket still clutched in her hand, feeling foolish and trying to think if she even knew someone by the name of Allie.

L uckily, Gramps had shown up at the house as promised, a few minutes before Nan walked in. He totally played it like he’d been home all afternoon, and Darby wasn’t about to say anything different. She knew the smell of beer on someone’s breath. Gramps had been gone for less than an hour and when he came back he didn’t even smell of cigarette smoke, let alone beer.
    Nan didn’t seem to suspect a thing. But Darby prided herself on having a long memory. She mentally banked Gramps’s little trip in the hope that it might buy her some freedom in the future. Sure enough, it paid off even sooner than she had hoped, though not in a way she would have ever expected.
    The next morning at breakfast, Nan bustled around the kitchen adding items to a long list she’d written on the back of a cash register receipt. Then she announced she was going to head up Granville Street to the big grocery store in the mall.
    “How are you planning to get all the way up there, Etta?” said Gramps.
    “Not me, Vern,” she said clearly. “We are going up by taxi. I have a long list and I’ll need your help to carry the bags. Things are different around here these days with a teenage mouth to feed. We can’t have our girl going hungry, now can we?”
    Darby cringed. The guilt. Not only was her presence costing them more, but she was making more work for them, too.
    “Do you want me to come, too?” she offered, hoping Nan would say no.
    Nan looked like she was going to accept Darby’s offer, when Gramps shot her a peculiar look. It took Darby a minute to realize he was winking.
    “Let the kid have some time on her own, Etta. I’ll help you at the store—and I’ll even call up Ernie to see if he’ll give us a discount fare on the trip.”
    Ah. So this was where Dad’s cheap gene came from. Darby laughed a little to herself. Well, Gramps could be as cheap as he wanted as long as it gave her some time away from peeling potatoes or one of Nan’s million other little jobs.
    Nan’s sharp eyes locked onto Darby as Gramps walked out of the room, jingling the change in his pocket in a cheerful way.
    “Don’t think for a minute that I don’t know a payback when I see one, young lady,” she said, without the hint of a smile. “Now, while you were enjoying your beauty sleep, I’ve spent the morning washing, so beforeyou get to riding that skateboard of yours, there are sheets waiting to be hung up out back.”
    Darby bobbed her head in the most obedient manner she could muster. “Yes, Nan. I’ll do them right now.”
    “See that you do.” She picked up her purse and followed Gramps through the front door. “Now, Vern, what’s this Helen tells me about your little visit to the Legion yesterday?”
    Wow. That Nan.
    Darby felt lucky she didn’t have to get past that kind of radar at home in Toronto. She’d never make it anywhere near the Eaton Centre with her skateboard, that’s for sure.
    As soon as the screen door slapped shut on the front porch, Darby raced into the little back room Nan called the scullery where she did the laundry. There was a big sink under the window and an old-fashioned washing machine with a huge basket of wet sheets on the top.
    No dryer.
    It took Darby about twenty minutes or so to hang up all the sheets on the clothesline behind the house. It was hot work, and she stopped for a minute in the middle to drink a huge glass of cold milk. When she headed back out to finish the job, she tripped over Maurice and almost dropped the last laundry basket. It