Read Fireflies in December for Free Online Page B

with Daddy that such talk was ridiculous and that people are people no matter what they look like or where they come from. To hear her speak to my daddy like she did made me worry and started that stomachache hurting worse.
    Why would Momma not want Gemma to stay when she had told me herself that God made us all and we were to love everyone the same? I couldn’t figure on it, but I knew one thing: I wanted Gemma to stay more than anything. I didn’t want to send her off to live with strangers or to be put into an orphanage. I’d read books about children in orphanages, and they sounded like horrible places.
    Well, Daddy had told Momma that Gemma was staying. That was settled. But I wondered about what Momma had said about violence, and I started to worry that maybe our lives were getting ready to change.
    My stomach hurt for the rest of the night.

    We lived in a small town where most people knew who we were, and up until that day in June, we were just the Lassiters. But after that day, we were mostly known as the people who took in the colored girl.
    It wasn’t only the white people who thought we were crazy; it was the colored people too. It seemed we were caught up in a game of tug-of-war.
    After a while of having Gemma with us, a few of Momma’s friends came by to “have a chat,” as they put it. I could tell by the few words I heard that they were talking about how wrong it would be to keep Gemma. It didn’t do anything to change Daddy’s mind. Even our minister, Pastor Landry, came to talk to Daddy. I watched from my bedroom window and saw Daddy smiling kindly but shaking his head. I knew that look enough to know that Daddy was probably saying something like, “I understand where you’re comin’ from, but I know what I know, and all I can do is stick to my guns.”
    My daddy hadn’t always seen life the way other people did, so he’d had to say things like that a lot.
    He said the same kind of thing to the people from Gemma’s church who came by to warn him of the trouble he’d cause by keeping her. The colored folk wouldn’t like it any more than the white folk, they told him. Stirring up trouble was all that would come of it, and Gemma would suffer. Only a week passed between the time of the fire and when she officially settled in at our house, but we got a couple months’ worth of complaints.
    Luke was different. He came by to check on us about every other day on his way home from work at the tobacco factory, always bringing some treat for me and Gemma. Some days he’d bring flowers he’d picked in the meadow on his travels home; other days he’d bring a stick of chewing gum or a piece of penny candy. Momma said he was spoiling us, but she really knew it was his way of showing how sorry he was. Most days he would stay to supper, considering that he was on his own and had no one to cook for him.
    “A man ought to have a hot meal to come home to,” Momma would tell Luke when he’d say she was being too kind to him. “I ain’t doin’ nothin’ but what any woman should.” And then she would follow that proclamation by saying, “Now, you sit on down here, Luke Talley, and fill that stomach before you go weak and scrawny.”
    I was convinced that Luke would never be weak. To me, he was the strongest man alive, aside from Daddy of course. In the last few weeks, I’d been seeing the world a bit differently. I wasn’t sure if it was because I’d turned thirteen or if it was because of what I’d been through with Gemma, but I was starting to feel different. I told Momma as much one day as I helped her hang the wash.
    “That’s just natural, Jessilyn,” she said around the clothespin she was holding in her mouth. “A girl’s bound to change when she gets closer to womanhood. It’d be odd if you weren’t feelin’ different.”
    “But I ain’t been thirteen for even three weeks. It happens that fast?”
    Momma finished hanging up my nightgown and turned to smile at me. “Daddy’s