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

to clean them out, lugging a bucket of fresh seawater upstairs every day for a week.
    When I had nightmares, or woke up crying after having a dream about Nana and remembering she wasgone, Grandpa would bring his command-post lawn chaise into his bedroom, put it next to the bed, and fix it up for me with my pillow and blankets. “Okay, kid, all set. And I’m right here. Did you say your prayers?”
    “I don’t know any,” I said.
    “
What?”
Even in the dark I could see his eyes pop and practically hear him making a mental note to talk to his heathen daughter. His grandchild didn’t know the Rosary, or even the “Our Father”? Grandpa was what Mom called a Christmas-and-Easter Catholic, but he still thought I should know at least a few of the usual prayers. “Never mind, I’ll teach you. I’ll say a line, and you say it back. Ready?”
    “Ready!”
    “ ‘Now I lay me down to sleep …’ ”
    On Sundays, Mom would come up from the city to get me. First she’d go to Cake Masters and pick up a blackout cake—chocolate cake embedded with cherries and covered with dark chocolate frosting—and a seeded rye, which was put in a big machine that chugged blades down on the bread until it was sliced perfectly. Then she’d take the 6 Train to the end of the line, Pelham Bay in the Bronx, and take a Crosby Cab to the house. We’d all go for a swim or a walk on thebeach, and after dinner Grandpa would send us home with quarts of clam chowder and beef stew.
    For a child being raised by a young woman who was herself still growing up, and with both of us going through a dark period of mourning for Nana, Grandpa was pure security: a strong substitute father who doted on me and could literally catch dinner in our backyard. As long as I was with him, I thought, nothing in this unpredictable world could hurt me.
    • • •
    At home in Manhattan I was a fearful kid. Our apartment was on the Upper East Side in Yorkville, not far from where the Guibes had lived before they moved to the Bronx. The neighborhood was great around 86th Street, okay in the upper eighties, and went from dicey to dangerous the further up you went in the nineties. We lived on 89th Street.
    Life was occasionally scary, stable only in its instability. A friend from school had a schizophrenic father, and one day the parents were warned to watch out for him because he’d been seen wandering around armed with a hunting knife and a Bible. Another friend was evicted from the apartment shelived in with several relatives newly arrived from China. She had to fight off kids we went to school with as they tried to steal her clothes from the piles the landlord threw out on the street. A boy in my third-grade class told me that a neighbor had been murdered during an attempted robbery: “They beat her up and killed her for a lousy dime,” he reported flatly, with none of the childlike glee that would indicate a fib.
    On the home front, things were less dramatic but still unsettling. Mom’s salary as a secretary/apprentice perfumer at a fragrance company just didn’t go that far, and when my biological father missed even one of his sixty-dollar-a-week child support payments, my mother’s brow would furrow with worry. The difference between worry and panic was about a hundred and twenty dollars.
    One night when I was eight years old, the pin in the old bolt on our door slipped, locking us inside our own apartment. We couldn’t call anyone because we didn’t have enough money to pay the phone bill that month, so the line was dead. We beat on the door and screamed until a neighbor came and called a locksmith.
    I had a series of babysitters who watched me afterschool until Mom came home from work. I remember a few lovely ones, like Mrs. Wittick, who kept her support hose up on her swollen legs with rubber bands and read the most violent Bible stories to me as many times as I wished. When I was about nine or ten, old enough to spend the afternoons by myself, I