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It was always Glory’s favorite day of the summer.
    She moved closer to the berry bushes with her mouth watering. Her first few attempts to pluck berries were marred by sharp stinging scratches from the thorns, but soon she remembered her technique and fared better. Granny was picking four feet away with her back to Scott.
    Glory gave frequent sideways glances in their direction.
    Every two- and three-year-old she’d ever been around had been out of one thing and into the next, little whirling dervishes. She’d seen mothers exhaust themselves at a park trying to keep their children from eating sand, chasing squirrels into the street, and climbing to dangerous heights.
    Again she looked at Granny, who was picking berries with her mouth pursed in concentration. Glory bit her lip, considering.
    Granny had always been so vigilant—covering outlets, locking doors, using wire ties on the cabinet under the sink that held the cleaning supplies—when her cousins’ children had been babies. Maybe age had begun to impair her judgment; her seemingly careless nature with this boy finally prickled too much.
    “Aren’t you afraid he’ll slip away, get lost out here?” If he ran into the underbrush, he’d be awfully hard to find. There were rock ledges, steep slopes, a dozen streams for drowning, and poisonous plants aplenty here.
    Granny cast a quick and casual glance over her shoulder at Scott. “Nah. Once he starts with that boat, he’ll keep at it until you take it away from him.”
    Glory could hardly argue the point; there he sat, not even looking at the squirrels as they became braver and grew gradually closer. “Odd.” She was surprised when she realized she’d said it out loud.
    Granny sighed. “Reckon it is. He didn’t used to be so . . . so focused.”
    “He seems, I don’t know, disconnected. Like he doesn’t really care what’s going on around him.”
    “Just try to take the boat away. He’ll throw a hissy that’d wake the dead.”
    Glory couldn’t imagine this silent, impassive child reacting that strongly to anything. She went back to her berry picking but kept a sharp ear out for the patter of tiny Nikes making for the woods. All she heard was the steady friction of that boat on the blanket.
    Once the buckets were filled, they both sat on the edge of Scott’s blanket to cool off before walking home. Just as Granny had predicted, Scott had stayed in one place, turning his boat the entire time they picked. He didn’t stop when they joined him.
    Glory lay on her back, watching a bushy-tailed squirrel jump from branch to branch overhead, chittering loudly.
    Granny’s gaze followed hers. “Buckeyes from this tree make a right fine paste.”
    Glory’s gaze shifted to her grandmother.
    “Pa used to make all of our school paste,” Granny said. “Didn’t know you could buy it at a store ’til I was ten.”
    Glory closed her eyes and thought of the jars of white paste with the flat plastic spreader built right into the lid that she’d used in grade school. Paste was cheap. That single statement brought into sharp focus just how poor Granny’s family had been. The kind of poor that even Clarice could never imagine.
    But Granny never spoke of being poor, of doing without. Her stories of childhood were all about adventures she and her brothers had had in the hollow. How once they’d actually roamed so far that they’d been lost overnight and her father had whipped the boys for endangering their little sister, when in reality it had been Tula that had led the way. Of the wounded baby bird she’d found in the yard that she’d nursed back to health; of the barn cat’s litter of kittens Tula had taken into Dawson to find homes, then visited on a regular basis to make sure they were being treated well—a feline protection agency of one; of Fourth of July parades and watermelon-eating contests. Never of threadbare, outgrown coats or winters without enough coal for the furnace.
    Granny had what