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disobey Caleb.’ Her fundamentalist foolishness.
    â€œâ€˜You wear an IUD without his permission.’
    â€œâ€˜That’s different.’
    â€œâ€˜So how he plans to feed these seven children?’
    â€œYour mother did not answer. ‘God will provide. Right?’” Grama said nothing for a while. “There’s more to this story. You all can read it in my diary after my death . . . Two weeks later your mother and I were off to Barbados.”
    In 2004, right after her death, I read what she’d edited out of the conversation:
    Imagine I deprived myself of an education to raise a fool! ‘Mama, I want children. Before Paul came, I was unhappy and depressed. I felt hollow and empty — like bamboo. Mama, I was born to have children, lots of children. No ifs and buts about it. I am never so happy as when I’m nursing a baby.’
    I told that fool: ‘Have all the children you want, but before you do, let your husband know he’ll have to break stones at night too, or become one of those preachers that can get their congregation to hand over all their wealth, because, darling, I won’t feed them. In the meantime if you change your mind, let me know.’ Maybe I should have had another child. Then again both might have turned out to be fools.
    When Kirton proposed marriage I had already signed up for extramural classes to complete my secondary education. Abandoned that and married him, and spent my youth raising a child who turned out to be a fool.
    The first and last sentence bothered me. I removed that notebook from the rest of Grama’s journals so Anna would never have to read this entry. Now I doubt I’d ever let Paul see it. Paul too thinks that Anna is a fool. Probably heard Grama say so during the long periods he spent with her in the store. Are there parents whose children don’t in some way disappoint them? Paul turned Anna’s life into unrelenting pain. I too have disappointed her. If I could, I would have chosen not to.
    ***
    â€œI think I know the rest of the story,” I told Grama that evening nine years ago.
    By then the porch light had come on, the sea looked like liquid lead, and the fireflies twinkled around us.
    Anna was gone for two weeks. Sister Simmons brought breakfast and supper for Daddy and me. At lunch I went from school straight to her house.

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    G RAMA. SHE INTIMIDATED me. Not like Caleb. He inflicted pain. With her it was the feeling that no matter how hard I tried I would never meet her expectations. Bizarre feelings. Totally bizarre. Other than the duties she assigned me — mostly to look after Paul during the years we attended school in Kingstown, I never knew what her expectations were.
    I wanted to know more about her origins but felt uncomfortable asking her. When we went home to bury her I began to find out. A Saturday afternoon. We’d spent the morning going over details with the undertaker. Paul was out wandering. Anna and I were sitting on the back porch, in the same spot where Grama had told me about Anna. Remembering this, I asked Anna to tell me about Grama.
    She spent a couple of minutes dreamily staring out at the water, and began by talking about her father. She had only vague memories of him. He died before she was four. At age 55, he’d returned from Aruba, where he’d worked at an oil refinery, and had married Grama, then aged 19.
    â€œGrama said it was not for love,” Anna said. “She said: ‘No darling, love had nothing to do with it. The young boys that made my eyes twinkle like fireflies didn’t have a thing to offer me. Nothing more than a firm body and a stiff rod. My half-paralyzed mother begged me not to. She was sure I would end up horning him, but I went ahead and married the old goat. He had a three-bedroom cement house with an indoor kitchen and two bathrooms; it didn’t bother me at all if his rod never did the job.
    â€œâ€˜Mama might have been