housekeeping.'
"'He ain't much at anything,' Steve muttered.
'Hungry?' he asked.
"'Sure,' I said and we went about preparing our
dinner. He was excited about the pie. I told him my
granny had made the crust. It was her specialty and no
matter how much I tried, I couldn't get it as good. He
liked hearing me talk about Granny, how she fidgeted
over her home cooking, her stories about her own
mother and father, and of course, her famous sayings. "When I asked him about his grandparents, he
could only remember his father's daddy. He had never
seen his mother's parents; they had both died before
he was five or six.
"I wondered why he didn't have any brothers or
sisters and he said, 'Just luck.'
"I was going to laugh when I saw how serious
he was about it.
"'Can you imagine if there was another kid in
this house, especially younger, like Rodney? You know what things have been like for him,' he said and we sat and talked a little more about life with an alcoholic for a parent. That's when I realized even more that we really were birds of a feather," I said and
paused.
"Why?" Jade asked. She didn't want to give me
a moment's rest, it seemed. Why was she so damn
anxious to hear all my story? I had come this morning
thinking they all wouldn't be interested in my poor
girl's life, and they seemed more interested in me than
in Misty and maybe themselves.
"Because of the feelings he had about it, the
kind of things he thought.
"'I used to feel like smashing things,' he told
me. 'My father was drunk so much, I was sure he