Carolina Moon

You’re the one having sex.”
    Amused, Iris cocked her head. “And whose fault is that?”
    “Yours. You saw Cecil first.” Tory got down two glasses, poured the tea. How many women, she wondered, could claim a grandmother who had hot affairs with the plumber? She wasn’t sure whether she should be proud or amused, and decided the combination of both suited the situation. “He seems like a very nice man.”
    “He is. Better, he’s a very good man.” Iris poked at the bacon and decided to get it done all at once. “Tory, he’s living here.”
    “Living? You’re living with him?”
    “He wants to get married, but I’m not sure that’s what I want. So I’m taking him for what you might call a test drive.”
    “I think I’ll just sit down after all. Jesus, Gran. Have you told Mama?”
    “No, and I don’t intend to as I can live without the lecture on living in sin and perdition and God’s almighty plan. Your mama is the biggest pain in the butt since self-service gas stations. How any daughter of mine turned out to be such a mouse of a woman is beyond me.”
    “Survival,” Tory murmured, but Iris only snarled.
    “She’d’ve survived just fine if she’d walked out on that son of a bitch she married twenty-five years ago, or any day since. That’s her choice, Tory. If she had any gumption, she’d have made a different one. You did.”
    “Did I? I don’t know what choices I made or which were made for me. I don’t know which were right and which were wrong. And here I am, Gran, circling right back to where I started. I tell myself I’m in charge now. That it’s all my decision. But under it all, I know I just can’t stop it.”
    “Do you want to?”
    “I don’t know the answer.”
    “Then you’ll keep going until you find it. You’ve got such a strong light in you, Tory. You’ll find your way.”
    “So you always said. But the one thing that’s always scared me the most is being lost.”
    “I should have helped you more. I should have been there for you.”
    “Gran.” Tory rose, crossed the room to wrap her arms around Iris’s waist, to press cheek to cheek while the bacon snapped and sizzled. “You’ve always been the one steady hand in my life. I wouldn’t be here without you.”
    “Yes, you would.” Iris patted Tory’s hand, then briskly lifted out bacon to drain. “You’re stronger than the lot of us put together. And that, if you ask me, is what scared Hannibal Bodeen. He wanted to break you, out of his own fear. In the end, well, he forged you, didn’t he? Ignorant s.o.b.” She cracked an egg on the side of the skillet, let it slide into the bubbling grease. “Make us some toast, honey-pot.”
    “She’s nothing like you. Mama,” Tory said as she dropped bread into the toaster. “She’s nothing like you at all.”
    “I don’t know what Sarabeth’s like. I lost her years ago. Same time I lost your granddaddy, I suppose. She was only twelve when he died. Hell, I was hardly more than thirty myself, and found myself a widow with two children to raise on my own. That was the worst year of my life. Nothing’s ever come close to matching it. Sweet Jesus, I loved that man.”
    She let out a sigh, flipped the eggs onto plates. “He was my world, my Jimmy. One minute, the world was steady, and the next it was just gone. And there’s Sarabeth twelve years old, and J.R. barely sixteen. She went wild on me. Maybe I could’ve reined her in. God knows I should have.”
    “You can’t blame yourself.”
    “I don’t. But you see things when you look back. See how if one thing was done different the whole picture of a life changes. If I’d moved away from Progress back then, if I’d used Jimmy’s insurance instead of taking a job at the bank. If I hadn’t been so hell-bent to save so my children could have a college education.”
    “You wanted the best for them.”
    “I did.” Iris set the plates on the table, turned to get butter and jelly from the refrigerator. “J.R. got his college education, and he used it. Sarabeth got Hannibal Bodeen. That’s the way it was meant to be. That’s why my grand-daughter and I are going to sit here and eat a couple of heart attacks on a plate. If I could go back and do that one thing different, I wouldn’t. Because I wouldn’t have you.”
    “I’m going back, Gran, knowing I can’t do anything different.” Tory put the toast on a little plate, carried it to the table. “It scares me that I need to go back so