Free Keeping Secrets by Sarah Shankman Page A

had hugged her neck and told her that she sang so sweet, sweeter than pecan divinity, one lady said. Even her daddy, who she knew really hated going to church, looked like he was crying and gave her a hug. And she remembered they had a big dinner on the grounds afterward, with mountains of the best fried chicken she’d ever tasted, golden brown and crusty, and fluffy biscuits that didn’t come out of a cardboard-and-silver tube and potato salad with both sweet and dill pickles, and chocolate cake and lemon meringue pie. Her momma had fussed at her for making such a pig of herself and asked why she didn’t eat that way at home, and Emma didn’t want to tell her that this was a whole lot better than her cooking because she didn’t want to hurt her feelings. But sometimes, when Momma just seemed to go out of her way to mess up her food, like this syrup on her egg, she thought she just might.
    “Well, young lady, are you going to sit there and let it all get cold?”
    Momma was in a bad mood again today. She looked tired already and like her stomach hurt. Emma knew better than to say her food couldn’t get cold on a day this hot. She picked up a biscuit and a piece of bacon.
    “That egg too. I want to see it down before you go anywhere.”
    “Yes, ma’am.” Emma nodded and pushed the egg to the edge of her plate, as far away as she could get it from the puddle of syrup.
    Then she heard her daddy calling through the screen door in the little hallway that separated their house from the grocery store.
    Rosalie put down the dish she was washing and wiped her hands on her apron. She frowned.
    “I’ve got to go see what your daddy wants. That egg had better be gone when I get back. Do you understand?”
    “Yes, ma’am.”
    Emma watched her mother’s back and waited until she could hear the slap of the screen door and then her voice asking Daddy what was it now. Quickly she chopped her egg into tiny pieces and scraped it in with the other trash in the garbage can under the sink. Her heart was pounding as she slipped back into her chair and reached for another biscuit. Momma would be really mad if she caught her. Momma never wasted anything, which probably meant that throwing away food was a sin they just hadn’t got around to telling Emma about at the West Cypress Baptist.
    She waited a long time, but Momma didn’t come back. So she carefully lifted her plate, knife and fork up to the sink and gently let them go. Then she ran into her room and buckled on her red sandals. It was too hot to go barefooted today. The sidewalk would blister her feet.
    In the store her mother’s voice was loud. “I told you to tell the meat man that we didn’t want that many this time.” Emma paused in the doorway.
    She loved the store. At night it was scary, but in the daytime it was her own special world.
    She adored the neat rows of canned goods. Since Momma had taught her to read last year, she was allowed to stock the lower shelves, but she didn’t really have to read to do that. The yellow label had a picture of spinach. Red was for tomatoes. The baby food was harder because all the jars looked alike. But even before she knew what the words meant, she could put all the same letters together. The Cs for chicken. The Ps for prunes. She still loved prune baby food. Her parents laughed about that. She didn’t know why.
    She took a few steps into the store and stood in front of the ice-cream freezer. It had six doors on top, and if you wanted chocolate you opened the chocolate door and reached down with a scoop into a deep can and took it—unless the ice cream was too hard. She could scoop it if she stood on a stool. And she knew how much it cost, too. Five cents for a double dip, but she didn’t ring it up on the cash register when her friends came over. She loved the cash register especially; that was her favorite thing.
    All the silver dollars that came across the counter were hers, kept in a little square cigar box on a shelf