Cherries in Winter: My Family's Recipe for Hope in Hard Times by Suzan Colón

much of the war before he was even of legal age to fight. A few months after his return his girlfriend Molly got pregnant. Edmund was painting trimon the side of the house when Charlie told him he was getting married.
    “Well, Charles,” Edmund said, his paintbrush evenly skimming the wood, “you’ve done things your own way again.”
    “Will you come to the wedding, Pop?”
    “I think not,” his father said.
    The marriage was brief; Molly died of influenza just a few years later. Charles was a war veteran, a widower, and the father of two small children—Charles Jr., nicknamed Chick, and Mary, who was called Midge—all by the time he was twenty-one years old. (No longer a stranger to medical events, he’d delivered both babies himself, at home.) Molly’s sisters took the children to live with their families in Connecticut, and Charlie spent the next ten years or so as a bachelor. Able to live quite well on his own with the skills his stepmother had taught him, he felt no hurry to find a new bride.
    “Your grandfather was a happy widower for years—it was almost a career with him,” says Mom. “When he got the job as a milkman and the Depression hit, not only was he making steady money when nobody else was, but he got to visit all the lonely housewives. He was famous in the dairy company as ‘The Heartbreakerof Sheffield Farms’ by the time he met your Nana at Orchard Beach in 1930.”
    The only beach in the Bronx—a stretch of sandy coastline on the east side of Pelham Bay Park—Orchard Beach was packed during the typically hot New York City summers. Matilda was a regular visitor; her uncle Hil was a lifeguard there, as was her boyfriend, Frank, and his friend Charlie.
    Frank was crazy about Matilda and desperately wanted to marry her. Unfortunately, his wife back in Germany refused to grant him a divorce. This stalemate opened the door to Matilda accepting an invitation from Charlie to go kayaking from Orchard Beach to Hunters Island one day.
    Time passed, the tide rose, and the kayak drifted away, leaving them stranded. Their friend Bruno Hauptmann found the boat and brought it back to them. (A few years later Bruno would be tried and executed for the kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh baby; Charlie always maintained that his friend had to be innocent.) When Charlie and Tillie, as he called her, got back to Orchard Beach, she told Frank it was over.
    “Frank wept hysterically,” Mom says. “He was prone to that. For some reason he remained a friendof your nana’s, and during the family functions he was invited to, he would either ask Nana to dance and dissolve in tears, or he’d pick me up and cry and say, ‘You should have been mine.’ Your grandpa would turn red in the face but just look at the floor. He felt guilty.”
    Tillie and Charlie married, and Chick and Midge, now teenagers, were sent for. Midge arrived with a suitcase full of hand-me-downs from a family that had taken her in more out of obligation than desire. Matilda, who at twenty-one was only a few years older than her new stepdaughter, threw all the old clothes away and immediately took Midge shopping and did her hair. Chick came with some apprehension about this new arrangement, but when he saw how his sister was being treated, he was won over as well.
    • • •
    NOVEMBER 1970
    THE BRONX, NEW YORK
    When he was sixty-eight, Charlie once again became a widower caring for a small child: me.
    From the time I was a toddler up until I was thirteen years old, I spent every weekend with my grandparents in the Bronx, and whole summers when school was out. At that time, Nana and Grandpa lived in a middle-class neighborhood in a modest, three-family house at the eastern edge of the Bronx. Long Island Sound was in our backyard, so at high tide we could swim or take the dinghy out for a row, and at low tide there was a nice quarter mile of beach to walk on. It was a safe, close-knit neighborhood with lots of kids for me to play