Slowly warming in his mouth, through the ache they brought to his jaw, he tasted their dense and icy sweetness. He had just finished them when Vanetta reappeared. The ironing board was up next to the stove, with a stack of laundry waiting for her. She spread out one of his father’s shirts, hooking the collar over the board’s narrowed nose, and picked up the iron, saying softly, ‘I hope you left some in the carton, Bobby.’ She was only half-smiling. ‘Your daddy’s got people for dinner on Saturday and Merrill wants to serve those with some ice cream.’
‘There’re lots left, Vanetta,’ he said, avoiding the issue of whether he had taken any, though they both knew he had.
It was January and they were in the kitchen, Bobby at the rickety table with his homework. Outside the wind was blowing new snow into the back alleyway. Mike D’Amico had come up the outside stairs in back with the vegetable delivery, and when Vanetta held the door open for him cold air had overwhelmed even the warmth from the stove.
His father had taken a freezer locker in Fennville, where he’d stored the cut-up half-steer he’d bought on the advice of his friend, the county agent, along with several lugs of fruit. Cherries, of course – it was cherry country – but also sliced strawberries, raspberries, and sliced peaches and plums frozen in syrup. On a weekend trip north that autumn they had collected fruit, put it in plastic cartons, and brought it down in a cool box to deposit it here, in the South Side freezer.
Fruit meant summer, fruit meant warmth, fruit was a talisman of another place than this large, dark apartment on the South Side, where Bobby didn’t want to be. He sensed Vanetta didn’t want to be there either. So he would prod her into talking about her own childhood, deep in the Mississippi delta, on her father’s small farm. ‘What did you grow on the farm, Vanetta?’
He knew the answers, but the shared imagining of her telling took them both out of the dark cold winter of Chicago. She said, ‘Oh, most everything we wanted to eat. There weren’t no store near us – it took two hours to get to town. That was on a horse – we didn’t have no car.
‘We grew every kind of vegetable. Beans, and peas, and corn – nice corn – and tomatoes so fat and soft they made your mouth pucker just looking at them. Potatoes too each spring, and sweet potatoes.’ The latter were Vanetta’s favourites.
‘And fruit?’ He was never very interested in vegetables.
‘We had all sorts of fruit. Strawberries, just bursting with juice, and raspberries too. Not so many cherries – we had one tree but it’s awful hot for them in Mississippi. But come summer there’d be peaches as big as baseballs – there’s nothing better than a good peach pie, especially with home-made ice cream. You had to work so hard making ice cream back then it made it taste extra good.’
She was chopping cabbage for coleslaw, made with oil and so much vinegar his eyes popped eating it. He loved its sourness.
‘Please sit down with me, Vanetta.’
‘Let me just finish this, baby.’ When she had she went to the fridge and took out a bottle of Pepsi and a snowball – two coconut-coated balls of rubbery fluff surrounding chocolate cake with a cream centre. She cut one of them in half and put it on a plate before him, then opened the Pepsi and poured a couple of ounces out for him into a plastic cup. Then she sat down at the table, too. Biting into the other half of the snowball, she nodded appreciatively and closed her eyes, dreamlike.
‘Hard to believe spring is ever going to show up – but it always does. Only I can’t remember a winter as cold as this. Seems like the snow’s forgot to stop.’ She picked up a deck of playing cards she’d had on the table and started laying out her own, semi-impossible game of solitaire. Bobby hated it because you almost never won. But he liked to watch her play, liked staring at her hands, their rich deep brown with pinkish half-moons around the cuticles. The brown skin meant she was a Negro. He understood that now, and he had laughed like someone in the know when she’d told him about the little boy in another household who’d complained that her skin was always dirty.