“The house and yard cover about two acres,” Connie said.

“That’s what we figure we’ve got fenced in anyway,” Kate told her. “The house sits at the front of our hundred acres. We’ve got a garden and the cornfield out behind us. We gave up growin’ a steer or two for beef and the hogs and chickens about five years ago. Figured that with just the three of us, we could buy or barter for our meat and eggs as cheap as we could grow it, and besides, we was gettin’ too old to go out every mornin’ in the winter to feed and milk the cow.”

“If we’d have known Sloan was coming back home and we could’ve hired him to help us more than a day or two a week, we might still be doin’ all that, but hindsight is the only twenty-twenty vision most of us get.” Betsy sighed. “I did like having my own beef and pork in the freezer. You never know what that meat we get in the market might have been treated with.”

“Probably lots of salt to make us live longer.” Connie giggled so hard that she snorted.

Betsy rolled her eyes. “She always says that because Mama wasn’t even sixty when she died. She always had the garden and the livestock to help feed her girls when she ran the brothel. She didn’t have much bought food, so she didn’t eat all the preservatives that we do these days.”

“She said it gave her girls something to do in the daylight hours.” Kate’s tone sounded like she was telling Ginger that the price of corn was going up that year. “Now it gives us something to do other than just sitting down and waiting to die.”

“Don’t talk like that,” Betsy scolded. “We’ve all three got lots of good years left on this old earth. I’m planning on living to be a hundred, myself.”

“Me and God got us an agreement. Long as I keep that commandment about cleanliness bein’ up there next to godliness, I get to keep dustin’ and cleanin’ this house and workin’ in the flower beds,” Connie said.

Sloan chuckled. “Did you get that agreement in writing, Miz Connie?”

“Nope. I figured God’s word was good enough,” she shot right back at him.

Ginger was glad that she’d just swallowed a big sip of sweet tea, or she would have spit it all the way across the table.

Chapter Three

Ginger could feel the expectancy in the house when she awoke on Saturday morning. There wasn’t anything particular that she could put her finger on, but the feeling surrounded her. The only way she could describe it was by comparing it to that year that she’d stayed with a foster family by the name of Williams. The Christmas tree had been set up in the corner of the living room and each of the three kids in the house had two presents under it. She felt the same anticipation that morning as she dusted all the furniture and knickknacks in the living room.

“We’ll just do this room today,” Connie told her, “because right after we finish eating at noon, we get to dye our eggs. Betsy boils a dozen for each of us, and then we get to decorate them.”

“What do you do with them?” Ginger asked.

“Why, honey”—Connie stopped cleaning the window ledges—“we pay Sloan to work for us after church tomorrow. He gets a good Sunday dinner that way, and then his job is to hide our eggs so we can hunt them. Rules say that they have to be inside the yard fence. We’re too old to be traipsing out to the barn to find an egg in an old chicken roostin’ nest.”

“I’ve never hunted Easter eggs,” Ginger admitted. “I hid them once for the younger kids, but the foster homes I lived in didn’t do anything special at Easter, or Passover for that matter.”

“Well, you’re in for a treat. Whoever finds the most eggs gets a hundred dollars as the big prize.” Connie went back to cleaning an already spotless window.

“If you get the prize money, what do you do with it?” Ginger asked.

“I tuck it away and give it to the church missionary fund the next Sunday,” Connie whispered.

“Did your mama give you that much money when you were a little girl?” Ginger couldn’t imagine having money that wasn’t needed for bills and food—dollars that she could spend on whatever she wanted.

“No. Mama gave us five dollars, and we had to give at least one of those to the church the next Sunday. In those days you could buy something nice with four dollars, but now you can’t buy a bag of sugar for that. So we upped the prize a few years ago. What are you going to do with the money if you find the most eggs?” Connie sat down in an old wooden rocking chair and set it in motion.

“I dreamed I would hunt eggs with y’all, and now it’s coming true.” The thought of even the possibility of having that much money in her hands was mind-boggling.

“Honey, we all hunt eggs on Easter.” Connie frowned. “Well, maybe not all of us. Sloan says that it wouldn’t be fair since he’s the one who hides them, and that we’re payin’ him to do that.”

“Well, then I expect if I wind up with that money, I’ll use it to buy a bus ticket to take me the rest of the way to California.” Ginger finished the last of the dusting. “What do we do now?”

“It’s half an hour until we eat dinner, so I expect we’d better go set the table for Betsy. Poor old Sloan has been out there plowing and planting corn all morning. He’s going to be hungry.” Connie eased up out of the rocking chair. “Kate’s too damn old to be raisin’ her own corn for the shine. She needs something to keep her busy, so I don’t fault her for makin’ the stuff in the basement,” Connie said. “I don’t even mind that she grinds it herself and makes her own mash, but she could buy the corn in the husk. The planting and harvesting is getting to be too much for her.”

Ginger didn’t know anything about making moonshine, so she kept her mouth shut, but she couldn’t help but think about that prize money. Would it get her all the way to California?

“Why did you decide to go west rather than east?” Connie asked as she made her way to the kitchen. “The silverware is in the drawer of that buffet over there.”

“I want to see the ocean, and I want my baby to know that there’s a world outside of Kentucky.” Ginger opened a buffet drawer and brought out the silverware.

“I used to feel like that when I was your age.” She took the dishes from the china cabinet. “I wanted to see if there was a world outside of Rooster, Texas, but after Mama took us to Medina Lake for a campout one weekend, I decided that Hondo was as far as I wanted to get from my home.”

“What happened at the lake?” Ginger asked.

“Nothing catastrophic.” Connie set out the gravy boat and four serving dishes. “I just hated being out there in the wilds. I didn’t like sleeping in a tent, and I hated the mosquitoes. I just wanted to be in my own bed, in my own clean room, and eating food that Betsy and Mama made in the kitchen rather than what they tried to make on an open fire.”

“But you made a memory, right?” Ginger wanted her baby to have good memories, and most of all grow up knowing that it would never spend time in the system.

“Oh, yeah.” Connie laughed out loud. “I had mosquito bites that took a week to heal, but Mama read to me every night and put her special salve on them to keep the itch at a minimum.”

Betsy came from the kitchen with a big bowl of salad in her hands. “Is she tellin’ you tales about the time Mama took us camping? That was so much fun. I learned about cooking over an open fire. Me and Mama burned the chicken, but the inside wasn’t too bad. If the end of times renders us without electricity or runnin’ water, at least we know how to fend for ourselves.”

“You sound just like Mama did,” Connie told her.

“I’ll take that as a compliment. I hear Kate and Sloan comin’ in the back door. Y’all come on in here and help me get the meal on the table,” Betsy said.

“We’re starvin’,” Kate said as she came into the house. “I forget from one year to the next how much work is involved in the corn plantin’ business.”

“Well, I keep tellin’ you to buy the corn,” Connie argued.

“I might buy it another year just to shut you up about it,” Kate fussed.

“She gets like this when she’s tired,” Betsy whispered. “Lord only knows that she’s downright sassy when it comes to her moonshine. We never did know our father real good. Connie was just a baby when he died, but Mama had a picture of him up in her bedroom, and Kate’s like him. Tall and thin and stubborn as a cross-eyed Missouri mule.”

“I’m standin’ right here.” Kate glared at her.

“And I can see you plain and clear,” Connie said. “Go wash your hands.”

“Don’t boss me,” Kate threw over her shoulder.

Ginger had seen children act like that, but never adults. It was almost funny, but she was careful not to laugh. She picked up the serving bowls and hurried into the kitchen to help Betsy bring the food to the table.