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told her daddy she thought Devere heard a different drummer after Grant read that to her in a book. “That’s about right, honey,” Grant had said. Devere loved her father and used to follow him everywhere, people said. But he never sees Grant now. Devere won’t go into town, hasn’t been there for years and years. When they need something, Odell gets it for them or Nora and Grace go to town in the pickup, and oddly enough it is Grace who drives.
    Devere folds his napkin carefully, pushes his chair back, and stands up. He’s a big man.
    “Not yet, not yet,” Grace twitters. “I made a coconut cake for Crystal.” Grace is also the one who makes the desserts.
    Obediently, Devere sits back down and unfolds his napkin and puts it back in his lap.
    Grace moves into the kitchen in her skittish, sideways fashion and comes back with the cake on a platter, little strings of coconut all over the white icing.
    “How is it?” Grace asks anxiously after she has cut and passed it.
    Crystal thinks she will die from eating. “It’s the best cake I ever ate,” she says with her mouth full.
    “Too much vanilla,” Nora says.
    “Oh, Nora.” Grace’s pretty little wrinkled face falls beneath the wisps of her hair. She tastes the cake herself. “Why, I think it’s pretty good,” she says.
    “Too much vanilla,” says Nora. But she eats two pieces all the same and Grace is pleased. Devere rises again and leaves, looking out the window.
    “I’m going to do the dishes,” Nora says, “if you all will help me carry them in.”
    “I’ll help you do them,” Crystal says, although she never volunteers to help out at home.
    “I will, too,” Grace says.
    “Not you,” Nora says to Grace. “What kind of help would you be? You’d just get in the way, that’s all, and besides you know how the heat does you. Go on in the parlor now, you all, and get out of my kitchen.”
    Crystal and Grace sit on the dark curved furniture, and out the window they can see the garden in the sun. Grace sighs automatically as she gets comfortable in her little chair and puts her feet up on her stool. “Heat does do me bad,” she confesses to Crystal. “Makes me feel dizzy, and I don’t know.” She stops abruptly. Crystal is used to Grace and the way her mind wanders off. Crystal loves Grace, and at home she has boxes and boxes of the tiniest clothes that Grace has made for her dolls.
    “Tell me about Grandmother,” Crystal says.
    Grace’s blue eyelids flicker and she begins, telling it all again, the way Crystal wants her to. “Well, we were all brought up in Baltimore, Nora and Emma and I, by our cousin Sam. We lived in a big house on the corner withpoplar trees in the yard and we went to Miss Jenny’s school. Not every girl went to school in those days, but Cousin Sam said since we were orphan girls we would have to make our way in the world, so he was training us up to be schoolteachers.” Grace pauses and then giggles.
“Amo, amas, amat,”
she says.
“Amor vincit omnia.”
Crystal stares. Grace giggles again and goes back to the story. “After we finished up at Miss Jenny’s, we all went out into the world. But I only went next door, that was all, to teach the children there their lessons. Nora taught school on the Eastern Shore of Maryland and had one whole little school to herself. But Emma! Emma was the religious one, you know, the smart one. She used to go around with a bow in her hair. Well, Emma had a vision that she wanted to be a missionary of God and knowledge, that’s how she put it, and so she read in the paper about the Methodist Day School being started in this country and she sat right down and wrote them a letter and they took her right away.”
    Nora sings a hymn in the kitchen, clanking plates together in the sink. Grace whispers out the story in her soft, soft voice, and Crystal is getting sleepy. She grinds her hand into the starched antimacassar on the arm of the love seat where she sits, rubbing the stiff