She Called the Bride the Help, So I Read the Bill Aloud novel · Chapter 17 of 24

Chapter 17: The Ledger

I made payroll on the fifteenth out of the money I had put aside for a down payment on a second van.

I did not tell Reuben, because I would have had to refuse the check he would have written.

On Sunday I told my grandmother, because she asked me, over a skillet of cornbread, what the bank had said.

"They froze it," I said. "The whole line."

"Mm," my grandmother said.

"I'm all right, Mamère."

"You are a bad liar, chère. Sit down. Both of you."

Reuben was standing at her counter with a dish towel, drying a plate that was already dry.

He had been in her kitchen for an hour.

She had given him a knife and a bag of onions at the door, and he had cut them in neat even squares, and she had not said a word.

Now she looked at the plate in his hand.

"He dries before he stacks," she said to me.

"I noticed."

"His father taught him, or a woman did." Odile turned and pointed her spoon at him. "Which?"

"My grandmother, ma'am," Reuben said. "In Vidalia."

"What did she cook?"

"Dumplings. Sauerkraut. She put cinnamon in everything."

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