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  What should she bake this morning? She had been thinking about one of her more complicated recipes, ginger cookies frosted to look like half moons, but the children liked simpler things. She flipped through a new cookbook, one borrowed from the library, and found a recipe for strawberry cupcakes. Too early for fresh strawberries, but she had frozen, and the recipe said that was okay. Not preferable, but okay. Once, she would have been wracked with doubt over such a choice. The instruction Season to taste almost left her in tears. How could she be trusted to make such a momentous decision on her own? How could she leave it to her taste, her mouth, so clearly inferior to everyone else’s?

  When she first started baking, Callie had watched the various cooking shows on television and treated their words as gospel. Then she had realized that there was a multitude of small disagreements as one traveled from the Church of Martha to the Church of Paula to the Church of That Italian Girl Whose Name She Could Never Quite Get. She began to check out cookbooks at the local library, looking for one authority she could respect, someone with standards yet not overly fussy. No one was right. Again, it was that chiding quality, the smug murmur of the playground all over again. You can do it that way, but you should do it this way. She almost found the guide she was looking for in this British woman, but then she saw her on television and decided she was too beautiful and poised. A woman like that could never really understand someone like Callie, what went on in her little neat-as-a-pin kitchen, her messy mind.

  Months went by before Callie realized she could, in fact, buy a cookbook if she desired. More than one. Other than her time at community college, she had never purchased a book for herself. She drove over to Salisbury, where there was a Barnes and Noble. The selection overwhelmed her and she went outside and sat in her car for a while, fighting the urge to turn around and go home. Once, only once, when she was twelve, she had been inside Donna Howard’s house and sneaked upstairs, where she had thrown open the closet doors and looked at the clothes hanging there. How did someone ever choose from such a bountiful array? The bookstore reminded her of that feeling. It had been much easier at the little library, taking what was there. She had never even put a book on hold. Eventually, she persuaded herself to go back inside the bookstore and emerged with not only a cookbook but a coffee drink, which had required almost as much in the way of decision making.

  The book she had chosen was fat and bright yellow. How to Cook Everything, it promised. No photographs, just simple line drawings, and written in a style that reminded her of her favorite teacher, back in junior high, a biology instructor who explained things in such cheerful, confident tones that Callie didn’t stop to think if a task was hard or difficult, or even that biology was a science and she hated science. This book had the same kind of brisk you-can-do-it attitude. She found herself speaking to the author, Mr. Bittman—she couldn’t imagine using his first name, although they were probably not that far apart in age—as she worked. “Must I use milk in my omelet, Mr. Bittman?” “Yes, Callie, it does make a difference.” “What are your thoughts about cake flour, Mr. Bittman? Piecrusts?” “I believe in using all butter in piecrusts.” Although she had a radio and a television in her kitchen, she worked in silence, the better to commune with her teacher.

  In the early days, she had tossed out the things she made, feeling wasteful, not sure what else to do with them. She liked baking sweet things, but she didn’t have much of a sweet tooth, strange to say. The seven years in jail had taken a toll on her digestive system and she found she could eat only simple things, in small amounts. A piece of fruit or a cup of yogurt at breakfast, soup at lunch, a sandwich at dinner. She learned from Mr. Bittman how to expand her menu. She roasted a chicken and marveled at how good it tasted, then stretched it out for days—cold chicken for lunch, chicken salad with homemade mayo. She squeezed a lemon wedge over a piece of fish, broiled, not fried. But she felt she must bake at least once a week, and she had no idea what to do with all that food.

  She tried to give her baked goods away, attempted to interest local shops and food pantries, only to run into all sorts of rules and regulations. Eventually, she found a private Christian school down toward Cambridge that allowed her to sell her treats at lunchtime and donate the profits back to the school. Callie had a feeling that even this arrangement was vaguely outlaw, susceptible to being shut down by the health department at any moment. And she wasn’t sure that she wanted to get in too deep when it came to the school’s beliefs. They struck her as the kind of Christians who were a little short on forgiveness, who would not want to consort with her if they knew about her past. She had even worried, for a moment, that her name registered with the principal, but that was pure paranoia on her part. If her first name hadn’t been shortened, all those years ago, it might have been more memorable. But, bless Tisha, she had been Callie since she was nine, and while it wasn’t the most ordinary name, it could slip by where Calliope never did. It had been strange, a month back, to hear that version of her name again. She had thought—maybe hoped, to be honest—that something might happen. What, she didn’t know. Something, anything, to relieve the sameness of her days, not that different from jail when you got down to it. Dull days, haunted nights.

  The cupcakes were almost too easy to make. She paged through the book, the kind filled with stories and gorgeous photographs, more incredible than any fairy tale Callie had known as a child. Fairy tales, with their evil people and inexplicable behavior, made perfect sense to Callie. A cookbook where every food memory seemed to be a happy one—that was something she couldn’t quite fathom. Hadn’t anyone else ever dropped a fast-food burger and had it snatched from her hand, told she couldn’t eat it because it had touched the ground? Didn’t anyone else ever spill her sweet tea? She couldn’t imagine buying this book. Besides, she had yet to be disappointed by Mr. Bittman. He had promised to tell her how to cook everything, and she had yet to find anything she wanted to cook that he couldn’t help her with. Callie was big on promises, too. She kept the ones she made, no matter how often others broke their promises to her.

  Why hadn’t she baked for her boys, either of them? Of course, Donntay didn’t live long enough to eat solid food. Why hadn’t she been able to keep a spick-and-span house as she did now? Was it simply a matter of being older? Or was it also about having money? Could she have had money before? But she had never asked, and even now, she took it with reluctance. She wasn’t a gold digger, and despite what some people thought, her pregnancies had not been an attempt to trap or embarrass anyone. But she had been overwhelmed by motherhood, unprepared. And something more. Once, when Gloria made her talk to a psychiatrist, Callie had tried to describe the feeling, akin to living in an airless tunnel. In the weeks after her boys were born, she couldn’t quite breathe and she felt as if her eyelids were closing of their own accord. Not because she was tired, necessarily, although she was exhausted.

  Of course, she was brokenhearted, too, but she couldn’t tell that part, could she? Oh, she knew what Gloria promised, how she could tell her or the psychiatrist anything and it would be held confidential. Anything, of course, except the circumstances of what really happened that morning, the day that Donntay died.

  She packed the cupcakes into the boxes she now kept on hand and drove down to the school, her car fragrant with strawberries. The boys hung back at first, but the girls went crazy for those pink cakes and the boys soon realized it was pink or nothing. She charged fifty cents, which meant thirty-six dollars for the school. The principal said Callie could deduct it all from her taxes if she kept records, but Callie didn’t take deductions. With a paid-for house and Delaware’s low property taxes, it didn’t pay for her to fill out the longer form. Besides, that would have been another lie, claiming she was doing charity when she was really baking to hold on to her own sanity.

  Driving home, she thought about the cake that had been served at Donna Howard’s end-of-school party. Instead of the usual sheet cake, it had been more like a wedding cake, multiple l
ayers in a hard sheen of frosting, a garden of flowers spilling down its side. Tastewise, it had been disappointing. The flavors were too grown-up for kids, Callie realized now. Could she make such a cake? It wouldn’t do, not for the school, but the challenge appealed to her. She had come a long way in the five years since she had been amazed to learn that creaming butter did not, in fact, mean adding cream to butter. She could make a layer cake, but what would it take to create one of those hard-candy icings, more like armor than sugar? She would have to consult Mr. Bittman. She imagined him standing next to her, his voice soothing and mellow, reaching in to show her a technique. The librarian had said there were videos, that Mr. Bittman had a blog that Callie could read on the library computers. But Callie had her version of the man and she didn’t want anything to intrude on that. She would make the cake and take it to her mother’s nursing home, where the staff was always grateful for her treats.

  With every spin of her hand mixer, with every egg cracked and every cup of flour sifted, she told herself that she was making a lie true.

  CHAPTER

  27

  CASSANDRA GOT LOST THREE TIMES en route to Fatima’s house. The street names were vaguely familiar, but any landmarks that might have helped orient her in this northwest suburb were long gone. Following the signs to what she was promised would be the town center, she found herself at a mall. She thought she remembered the mall from a years-ago trip, but it had been newer then, glossier, with high-end stores such as Saks. Now it looked a little seedy and neglected, and Saks must have been a mirage. Talk about “no there there,” Cassandra thought, reprogramming her GPS.

  Finally, she found her way to Fatima’s neighborhood, one of those developments with basically a single street name, Rosewood, and multiple suffixes: Court, Path, Lane, Circle. The houses were tightly packed around the cul-de-sacs, the front yards sacrificed to make room for huge driveways that fed into three-car garages. It was nice enough, Cassandra supposed, solidly middle-class. Yet, like the mall, it had the feel of a place that had once been a little nicer, and there was an abundance of FOR SALE signs. She sensed she was in a part of town where people had overextended themselves. Fatima’s house, in particular, looked stressed. While generally neat and well maintained, there were signs of larger things that required an expert’s care—a slight sag in the garage roof, pitting in the stucco exterior. Yet there was a large Lincoln Town Car in the driveway, shiny from a recent wash.

  “Cassandra,” Fatima said on a sigh, resigned yet not surprised. “How did you find me?”

  “It wasn’t that hard,” she said. No reason to endanger Teena’s job. And it wouldn’t hurt to let Fatima think Cassandra might know far more about her than her address and credit history. Although those two details, along with her matriculation at Spelman, were all that Cassandra had. That and her memories of the girl she had known.

  Where did that girl go? she wondered, taking a seat in Fatima’s neat yet gloriously tacky living room, which was dominated by a credenza of glass, mirror, and metal. It held exactly one book—a white leather-bound Bible—and a series of objects that seemed to have no connection to one another. A porcelain doll, a vase in a vaguely Oriental style, a statue of two deer, a basketball trophy, a ceramic basket of pink flowers, and an enormous family photo with almost thirty people crowded in the frame, all wearing T-shirts that proclaimed HOLLINS FAMILY REUNION. The last made her happy for Fatima, the idea that she was part of such a large and loving family. Fatima had been an only child, raised by a single mother. For all her brashness, there had always been a hint of loneliness, too.

  But while the woman facing Cassandra still bore a physical resemblance to the girl—albeit much, much, much bigger—the essence of Fatima wasn’t there. This was a fearful woman, reticent and nervous. None of these words had applied to the young Fatima. Nor did Cassandra recognize the almost deferential tone in which Fatima began to speak.

  “So you’re a writer.”

  “Yes, I mentioned it to you at church the other day.”

  “I don’t read much. There’s not really time. And Gaston—he’s my husband, you saw him there—he didn’t really approve of what I did read. Romances and the like. He said they were frivolous and not exactly Christian.” She lowered her voice as if they might be overheard, although the house gave every appearance of being empty. “I still sneak a Zane every now and then. Do you know her?”

  “I know of her,” Cassandra said. “She’s very successful.”

  “She’s from Maryland,” Fatima said, suddenly skeptical, and Cassandra realized that Fatima believed the writing world to be not unlike her megachurch, a huge congregation of people brought together by a single common interest and geography. If Cassandra didn’t know Zane, could she really be a writer?

  “Well, she’s very private, isn’t she? The thing I want to talk about is—”

  “Callie. I know, you told me at church. I got nothing to tell you, though. I don’t keep up with her.”

  “But you certainly remember the girl we knew back then. You knew her better than most, in fact. She wasn’t part of our crowd, but she was from your old neighborhood, right?”

  “We went to School Eighty-eight together.” That was a Baltimoreism, using the number instead of the name. “That part of Edmondson Avenue was rough, even then. My mama was glad to get me out of there.”

  “Rough?”

  Fatima shrugged. “Rough for the times. Mean kids, lots of fighting. Not the kind of rough you see now, with kids taking guns to school and the like. But harsh enough.”

  “And you moved in across the street from the Barrs, Tisha and Reg.” Childish, but Cassandra enjoyed saying his name when she could.

  “Yeah.” Fatima managed to get a lot of emotion—doubt? fear?—into that one syllable.

  “What was Callie like?”

  “You saw. Quiet. All she wanted to do—all she ever wanted to do—was stay out of trouble.”

  “I don’t recall her ever being in trouble at school.”

  “Not at school. At home. Her mama—her mama was strict. Real strict. It was like—” Fatima paused and Cassandra used all her will not to rush in, fill the silence. Let it go, let it go, she reminded herself. If you don’t speak, she’s more likely to keep talking, building momentum. “It was like, if she was stricter, if she held Callie in hand, then somehow people couldn’t gossip about her. She took to calling herself by her own name, back when almost no one did that, you know?”

  “Her own name?”

  “You know, Myra Tippet. Only she put a Mrs. in front of it, even though there was no Mr., which is why she was determined to be proper. ‘Mrs. Myra Tippet does not cotton to coarse behavior, Fatima.’ That kind of thing.”

  “Oh, third person,” Cassandra said, then hated herself for it.

  Fatima smiled. “Same old Cassandra, always with the right answer. Anyway, it didn’t matter how much she called herself Mrs., how hard she was on Callie. Everyone knew that Callie didn’t have a father, never did. I didn’t either, but at least I was legal, you know? Oh sure, I was barely legal. My mother was six months gone on her wedding day and my daddy was gone six months after the wedding day. But I had a father’s name on my birth certificate, a real one. Callie’s daddy? No one ever knew who he was, including Mrs. Myra Tippet, even if she did put Jenkins on the birth certificate.”

  “I don’t get it. Why would she give Cassandra a different surname?”

  “I don’t know.” Fatima sucked her lower lip, thinking. “When you lie, you got to make it specific, right? Or maybe there was a Jenkins among her mens, and she hadn’t decided yet that she was going to be born-again proper. She was one of those good-time girls who has had her fun, then figures she’s going to be so good that no one can doubt her again.”

  “Like you?”

  “What are you saying?” A flash of the old Fatima here. Challenging, defiant.

  “Tisha told me—or was it Donna—that you were”—she searched her memory for the word, which ha
d delighted her. “Churchified now, and didn’t want to be around people who knew you back in the day.”

  “Who said, Tisha or Donna?”

  It seemed an odd point on which to fixate. “I’m not sure. Tisha, I think.”

  “Well—” Fatima was clearly angry yet trying to hold herself in check. “I’m just trying to have a life. I met a good man, married him. We have three sons. Things haven’t always been easy for us—he started a business two years ago, a transportation company. Town cars and limos, the kind of things people don’t splurge on in these times, although proms are coming, that should help.”

  “When was the last time you saw Callie?”

  “We went to community college together. And we worked together for a bit.”

  “Where?”

  “You don’t know that part?”

  “No.”

  She gave her a long, level look. “You don’t want to mess with them,” Fatima said at last.

  “Who?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Trust me. If you don’t mess with them, they won’t mess with you. And they’ll give you a chance, if you need it. They’re not unfair. They’ll help you, if you need help. Only you got to let this go.”

  “But—”

  Fatima leaned forward. There was so much of her now, but there was a firmness to all that flesh, a solidity. Cassandra couldn’t help wondering what it felt like inside Fatima’s body. She carried herself with the same cocky confidence she had as a girl and there was an almost gleeful exhibitionism about the way she dressed. Caught unawares at home this afternoon, she wore a bright, boatneck tunic covered with green, orange, and yellow flowers, with matching green slacks and yellow flats.

  Or had she been caught unawares? She hadn’t seemed particularly surprised to see Cassandra, not the way she had been at church.