| the air. “It’s over, okay? Just leave it alone.” Be firm but loving, Brady had said. Don’t cross-examine. Never press her into a corner. But do not forget for a moment, and don’t let her forget, which one of you is the child and which one is the parent. “All right, Vanessa. We don’t have to talk about it. Not just now. But we are going back inside.” A hint of steel to remind her daughter that the Harlem side could be as tough as the Barbadian. “No.” “What did you say to me?” “I said no. I’m not going.” More steel. “Vanessa, I’m not taking a public-opinion poll here.” “And I’m not stating an opinion. I’m stating a fact. I can’t go in there.” Then she calmed down. “Look. I really can’t be in there just now. I’m sorry. I’m not being disrespectful. But I can’t go back in there. I just can’t. Please don’t make me.” Julia studied her child’s troubled face, saw moisture welling in her eyes, felt the mistiness in her own. Oh, Vanessa, what’s wrong with you? What’s happening? “Then I’ll stay out here with you.” “You don’t have to do that.” “I want to.” “No. No, it’s okay.” Touching her mother’s coat, the gesture at once affectionate and dismissive. “Really. You go back in. Maybe you can still get a wafer.” “Vanessa—” “I’ll be fine, Moms. Honestly. I promise not to burn anything, okay?” “That’s not what I was going to—” “Moms, look. I’m |
be. The countertops are polished white marble shot through with jagged green highlights. The bright red Coca-Cola sign is half a century old. The single room seems to go on forever, but it’s really no more than twenty by thirty, the rest just a trick of the mirrors. The candies all sit in glass cases and jars: peppermint sticks in different colors, lollipops with long red swirls, a hundred varieties of jelly beans, truffles, buttons, straws, butterscotch, little mailboxes and Statues of Liberty and Ford Model T cars that dispense mints, hard candies in rolls and hard candies on sticks and hard candies shaped like animals, eight flavors of fudge, and all the chocolate the addict could wish, including an elegant diet-busting concoction, all Vera’s own, called cranberry chocolate. Something new is always baking. The luscious aromas drive you half mad, just the way they are supposed to. Whether you like candy or not, you begin to salivate as the desire for sinful pleasure snares you, and before you know it you are ordering everything in the shop. Vera, atrociously plump, cheeks puffy and pink, white-gray hair drawn neatly into twin buns, measures a pound of chocolate-covered raisins by eye as she talks your ear off, explaining in her husky smoker’s voice the problem with the Carlyle house. And you listen to the story because you really do want those raisins. Vera talks about the house. She has good, solid reasons why they should never have let the Carlyles build |
