Feeding the Hungry Ghost: Life, Faith and What to Eat for Dinner

Warm, wicked and one-of-a-kind, Ellen Kanner offers an irreverent approach to bringing reverence into daily living — and eating. The connection between Diwali and Christmas finds its way to the table, along with T. S. Eliot and ancient Vedic poetry, and of course, food. From traditional Moroccan tagines to revamped paella, Kanner brings culture, faith and food together. She's the vegan inviting everyone to the table.

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Making God Laugh - Chapter 1

On the morning of November 14, the twenty-first day, they let me out of juvy. "Be a good girl, Rivera," Jan, one of the screws, said. "Don't fuck up."

She gave me my paperwork and released me into the custody of Orlando, my case worker, who gave Jan one of his pursy-lipped smiles before squiring me out, his hand on my elbow.

"Come on, Orlando," I said, shaking him off. "I'm not going to run off again." I wanted to, though, wanted to take off flying down the street, run out of my life and into forever. Instead, I stood there inside the chain-link confines of the juvenile justice compound while ol' Orlando did a riff on his favorite Didn't I Know How Lucky I Was speech.

I nodded, uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh, but mostly, I looked around. I'd been in lockdown three whole weeks, and here it was, the same old world, but it looked beautiful to me. The Juvenile Justice Center's sprinkler system was on, watering dead grass, but the beads of water danced in the light before they fell. The hot dog stand lady was setting up on the sidewalk, same as always. I wanted to kiss her, kiss her quilted silver roach coach, the pale, parched grass, the metal bars of Nasty Boyz Bail Bonds across the street, the Fire Arms Not Permitted sign posted outside juvy justice, the morning sun baking some warmth into me. They kept it so cold in detention. Did they think freezing us would make us behave better?

As we headed through the parking lot, I caught sight of Orlando's rusting, rust-colored Tercel -- a great car to steal because no one cares if it's missing. I did a quick calculation -- grabbing his keys, getting in and driving off wouldn't work -- it would take too long.

"So, you taking me back?" The thought of it, going back to Judith, my foster mom, back to that house, the living room thick with cigarette smoke and Judith and her friends and their complaints made my insides cold and heavy, like leftover oatmeal.

"Soon," Orlando said, steering me toward the big gray courthouse. He had a case upstairs, he said. He'd be back in half an hour.

"Well, what the fuck do I do in the meantime?"

"You watch your language, missy, that's what."

We passed through security. My belt set off the metal detector. It always does, but I don't have another one. The guard, who never spoke, passed his wand all up and down me, twirled his fingers to get me to turn around, then ran the scanner again. He jutted out his chin to show I could go.

Orlando squinted at his own reflection in the smoky glass office window. He patted his hair. He took out his wallet, peeled off a five, told me to get something to eat, then looked at the guard.

"Don't let her leave," he said, and headed upstairs.

"Right," I told the guy. "If I make a break for it, shoot to kill."

The guard looked down, silent, but he was smiling.

I stopped by a dying palm in the central courtyard, took out my cell and tried to call the momster. Turns out the juvy screw at intake hadn't even turned it off. She'd left my phone on for three weeks, so now it was totally non-operational.

"Shit."

The guard looked at me. He was black with a kind of bulldog build -- squatty, bunchy biceps and thighs, a slab of a jaw, shaved head with one of those big rolls of skin at the back of his neck.

I gathered up my hair as best I could, wound it around and around then realized I didn't have anything to hold it in place.

The guard handed me a pencil.

"Thanks," I said, shoving it into place. "Maybe I should shave my head like you. What do you think? Should I get a new do?"

"Don't be asking Marcel," said a woman, bustling by in a swishy purple dress. "He never got nothin' to say. That's his charm." She told him, "Baby, I'm getting me a bagel. You want one?"

He looked down and smiled again, handed her some money.

"Can you get me one, too?" I asked, waving Orlando's five.

Purple dress lady looked me up and down. "Something wrong with your legs?"

"No, but --"

"Well, come on, then."

I had no idea where we were going. If Marcel had to gun me down over a bagel, I'd just have to risk it.

But we didn't go outside, we went down a hall that opened out into another courtyard I'd never seen. It was smaller and narrower than the main courtyard but it got better sun -- you could tell because the plants weren't dying.

The far side had a kitchen trailer set up, its pass-through window open and beside it, a board listing the lunch specials -- chicken and rice, pizza, tuna melt. The whole courtyard smelled of garlic and oil -- warm, friendly, like home should smell.

"Hey, Charlotte," said the guy behind the counter.

"Hey, yourself." She ordered a toasted bagel with cream cheese, a tuna melt, two Cokes and an order of curly fries.

She turned to me. "So much for my bagel. I'm a fool for Duane's tuna melt."

I could see being a fool for anything having to do with him. His skin was the shade of dulce de leche and he had big caramel eyes, short dreads and long arms, arms that could go around you three times without trying. He asked what kind of toast she wanted.

"Rye, if you got it. Buttered."

He buttered the bread and buttered her up, too, this lady twice his age and twice his weight, asking about her weekend, had she seen any movies, he'd loved that last film she recommended. He put a scoop of tuna on one slice of bread and topped it with a slice of cheese.

"You want lettuce and tomato?"

"Yes, but no onions. I hate onions."

He built the sandwich and gave it a flip. I could smell the melty cheese, the tanginess of the tuna. He cut the sandwich into two neat, clean triangles. The toast crunched. I like how the rye seeds make your tongue go a little numb.

The lady -- Charlotte -- paid and Duane handed her everything on a plastic tray. She gave me a nod, took the tray and took off. She had an ass the size of a microwave.

Then Duane looked at me. "Do you up a tuna melt, too?"

"I don't know." I still had three weeks of starchy glop sitting in my stomach. A tuna melt felt like too much work to eat.

My hair was already coming down, so I pulled out the pencil and it all sprang away. I swear my hair is like antennae or something. I gathered it up all over again.

Black beans and rice? Nah. Hamburger? No way.

"Scramble you some eggs?"

I looked up.

It was just what I wanted -- soft, buttery eggs, gentle and tender in my mouth, sparked by salt and pepper.

"How'd you know?"

"I just know you look like a girl who needs some eggs. Maybe some toast."

"I don't see eggs on the menu."

"Nah, but I'll make you whatever."

He was all skinny and bendy, like he'd reached up and God had grabbed, pulled him and made him longer. I wondered how high I'd come up on him.

"How much for the eggs?"

"It's on the house."

"It is not." This little woman comes into the trailer with a crate of lettuce. She's half his size, but she's not acting like it. Her hair's short and somewhere between blonde and white -- a bad dye job. She set the crate on her hip like a giant baby. "If you want to make this girl scrambled eggs after breakfast hours, that's your business, but one of you's paying for it. It's two dollars -- more if she wants toast."

"I want toast," I said.

She looked at me for the first time. Then she went soft and smiled. "I just made fresh blueberry muffins, if you like."

"Maddy made some bad-ass muffins."

"Toast's fine," I said. "Rye toast. And I'll pay for it."

"All right, then." She hoisted the crate like it was nothing, dumped all the lettuce into the sink at the back and started rinsing. I wondered was she his boss, but she was doing scut work and they weren't paying each other any kind of mind.

Duane cracked an egg into a bowl. "So what brings you to juvy justice?"

"I've heard good things about the food."

It took him a minute, then he got it and laughed, cracked another egg and whisked them up good. He wiped down the grill, added a blob of butter, lay down two slices of rye. When the butter melted, he poured out the eggs, all sputter and pop when they hit the grill.

He messed the eggs around with his spatula like he worked at Benihana or something. "So, wild-haired girl, what's your name?"

"Cristina Graciela Rivera." I waited. "Call me Kiki."

He smiled at me, spatula forgotten. He'd have let the eggs go, too, but I hate when they're too done, so I said, "Those look perfect." They did -- pale yellow curds not quite set.

He glanced over. "Like that?"

"Uh-huh. I like 'em soft."

He scooped everything onto a paper plate, and turning around to make sure little blondie wasn't looking, added a blueberry muffin.

I handed him the five but he didn't take it. He brushed my hand instead.

"I like 'em soft, too," he said.

Now we both smiled.

Anything could happen.

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Excerpt from The Last Refuge, finalist for the Doris Bakwin Prize

Georgia Trevor wakes in a bed not her own and the man beside her is not her husband. At five in the morning, it’s already shaping up to be a bad day.

It started yesterday, all happy-happy at Lourdes’ wedding. It ends here somehow with her own little honeymoon. As the middle bits come together for her, Georgia decides sticking around is not an option.

She shimmies out of the bed she has shared with Trevor Barrow- his first name, same as her last name, what a coincidence -- and a stranger until they met fourteen hours ago. She is almost free, just unwrapping the tether of cheeseclothy sheet from her ankles when he sits up. Georgia holds her breath. Busted.

Trevor says something like, Gravlax, then lies back down. He shut his eyes, his lips part and she hears the soft, wet sound of mouth breathing. From awake to asleep, just like that. Like a puppy. Like a narcoleptic.

She throws on her clothes, steps into her shoes - the stupid satin bridesmaid’s pumps that stained her feet blue. She picks up her purse. But because there are no clean getaways, she turns away from the door and back to the sleeping man. She comes back to the bed, to the sagging mattress, to study the bump on the bridge of his nose. It messes up his face, it makes him more human. She bends to kiss it. His lips curve into a smile, but he doesn’t wake up. That’s when she bolts.

Or tries to. She turns down the long hallway, heels tapping on the bare concrete. She winds up at an ice maker and soda machine that sells only Orange Crush. Somewhere here is a stairway, a stairway with carpet no thicker than the bedsheet. Above the sweet scent of must, she can smell the tang of the river but she cannot find her way out of this place, this creaky fishing lodge at the last lost place on earth, Everglades City.

A door bangs shut behind her. She whirls. Trevor?

No, just two guys loaded down with fishing rods, tackle boxes, six packs, yawning and scratching their bellies. They freeze when they see her.

“Morning,” one of them murmurs.

She nods.

From twenty feet away, they can’t smell what’s on her -- sex and self-loathing - but they can see her just fine. They look her up and down, take in her rumpled red hair, her crumpled taffeta bridesmaid’s dress the color of Windex, the matching shoes. Pale anyway when she wakes up, she feels bloodless now in the mousy haze of dawn.

The fishermen nod in return and back away with slow determination. Like they’re veering around a Rottweiler. Georgia gives them eleven seconds, then follows them down the hall. They know things she doesn’t. They know the way out of here.

There’s the stairway. She catches a heel on that scrap of carpet and lurches down three steps at once. She grabs for the railing and rights herself, heart pounding, a clumsy idiot, but she has not tumbled onto the fishermen, so there’s that.

The lobby’s pine floor is almost black now. There’s the Christmas tree in the corner, its tinsel garland winks at her. There’s the screen door out. There is the Barron River, its depths impossible to gauge, its far bank lined with twisted mangroves, the mangroves clotted with egrets.

She gets in her car, pulls out of the scraggly grass and out of the parking lot. She is on her way, on the only road in and out of town, but she can’t help but look behind her. Like Lot’s wife. In her rear view mirror, Georgia watches Kismet Fishing Lodge recede.

It is not much, a two-story building curved out toward the water, its white paint peeling off the wood siding like a bad sun burn. Five plastic life-sized light-up snowmen are assembled on the roof. They’d been standing guard on the sidewalk when she arrived yesterday afternoon. They watch her with hard black eyes.

She is the only car on the road, which calls itself Broadway, but she keeps to the speed limit - twenty-five miles per hour. She moseys through the roundabout, passes the trailer park, crosses the bridge, but when she comes to the intersection of Broadway and Tamiami Trail, she makes a right and hits the gas. Georgia speeds the entire ninety miles back to Miami, trying to outrace what she’s done.

It’s not as though life was always like this. In fact, Georgia’s life was never like this. There’s the married thing for starters and the fact that shelter work does not lend itself to wild nights with strangers.
In the morning stillness, the Refuge could still be what it once was, someone’s private home, with coral rock courtyard and arched doorway. It’s clung to its 1927 stateliness as the neighborhood got worn down and torn down but eighty years of history don’t mean anything in a city that worships the new. Dwarfed by scaffolding and girders for in-the-works high rises, the Refuge has a hunched, cowering look, like a dowdy matron among lanky supermodels.

Across the street, standing at her usual post outside the construction site, is Baldy. Georgia rolls down her window.

Her fingers, so clever last night with Trevor, when they shouldn’t have been, are slow and fumbling now. “Good morning,” she signs, and it seems to take an hour.

From her spot on the cracked pavement, Baldy gives a you’ve-got-to-be-kidding roll of her eyes.

“Come have some breakfast,” Georgia signs.

Baldy adjusts the blanket around her shoulders with a model’s blasé grace, then shoots off her response, all swooping, darting gestures. It takes Georgia a moment to read her answer -- “Do I look hungry?”

Yes, she does. Her soft blue eyes -librarian eyes -- are bloodshot. Her street-aged skin, like her blanket, is blurred, frayed, mottled, gray in some places, red in others. Baldy is one of Georgia’s failures.

“Well, think about it. You’re welcome, you know.” Georgia signs the words, sculpts air and brings it toward her heart.

Baldy turns away to fuss with the cardboard that makes up her home and bed, presenting Georgia the back of her head. She has strands of gray hair above her forehead, otherwise, she is what she answers to, and her scalp is raw, patchy, hairless.

The first time Georgia saw her, she thought the woman might have some sort of skin disease from living rough. But she’s watched Baldy pluck at her head, her blanket. Georgia’s found a word for it -- trichotillomania - a compulsion to pull out hair.

Naming an illness doesn’t cure it, though, and she’s never gotten Baldy to come to the Refuge. Even Miami-Dade Human Care wants nothing to do with her. “Baldy likes the street, and when you like the street, ain’t nothing we can do,” says Margaret, the only sensible soul Georgia’s ever talked to there.

Georgia pulls into the alley behind the Refuge and pops open the trunk. As she grabs her overnight bag, two men crabwalk past, each holding the end of a kingsize mattress they’ve probably stolen. They say hey as they maneuver past. If they’ve committed a crime, it doesn’t seem bother them.

Georgia, on the other hand, would take a year off her life if she could rewind the last twenty-four hours and start over. This time yesterday, the only thing on her mind was being in Lourdes’ wedding and worrying about being too near the water. Who she was just a day ago seems quaint now. Yesterday, she had nothing to regret.

Her heart is racing, her brain is racing so Georgia stops in the Refuge’s courtyard to study the scarlet milkweed. With long green leaves, tiny red berries and sprays of yellow and red flowers, they can be beautiful. More often, though, they look the way they do now, leggy stems bare, stripped, as though left for dead.

The only sign of life are the dots of yellow on the stems - not fungus, butterfly eggs. Scarlet milkweed is the preferred chow of monarch butterflies. They have eaten the milkweed down to stalks, laid their eggs and slunk off somewhere to spin their cocoons.

In a week or two, the milkweed will boast new green leaves - it’s proof you can get chewed up and still come back, still live, still be beautiful. And the air will be hectic with monarchs. The mystery is how the black and white striped monarch caterpillars find the milkweed in the first place. It must be the same way women find their way to the Refuge from other towns, other states.

Georgia opens the Refuge door, breathing in the place’s own smell of sweat, ammonia and Ivory soap. She smiles. Every time she passes through the door, it’s like passing through an x-ray or an MRI, both of which she’s done plenty of times. She wishes she, too, could see inside people, including herself. The Refuge is as close as she’s ever come. The Refuge is where you get stripped down to who you really are.

Georgia locks herself inside and has time for a quick shower upstairs - six minutes, just like the Refuge women get, not long enough to shower off what she’s done. Afterwards, Georgia stands on the damp, gray tile and plows through her overnight bag. She wriggles into bra, panties, jeans, T-shirt. She wads the bridesmaid’s dress and shoes into her bag, and stepping into her sandals, sees the Ivory soap hasn’t taken the blue off her feet. Maybe no one will notice.

She goes downstairs and wrestles with the folding tables and chairs, doles out the cereal, loads the coffee urn, and with set jaw, sends out the media e-blast about the Refuge’s Christmas party. This was Lourdes’ old job.

It was Lourdes’ job because Lourdes knows how to charm the media. She can be funny, she can be light. Georgia, on the other hand, reads over her own message and though she’s gotten the facts right (over one hundred women being served, the donated food, the donated tree, the donated gifts), her message comes off sounding the way her husband David does when he breaks bad news to a patient. Still, it must be done. Georgia sighs. She hits SEND.

At eight, she unlocks the front door. Two dozen women have appeared, hovering like crows in the courtyard. They look up at her, they shuffle in. Dead last, Reverend Wanda John, her pale hair a wild nimbus around her head, her black dress crumpled and stained, the whites of her eyes stained, too.

Something else is different, too -- the usuals tend to cluster around her but they abandon the reverend now, like a litter of pups snubbing a runt. A mantle of space surrounds her. Whatever’s happened to Wanda John, the other Refuge women don’t have the energy to be part of it.

Georgia welcomes the newcomers, lays out the rules -- no using, no dealing, no buying, no fighting while you’re here. She helps them set up the folding tables and chairs in the hall, then she leads them to the kitchen, to the Styrofoam bowls of cornflakes, the jugs of milk, the cartons of cheap watered-down juice. The women form a ragged line and when Wanda John comes through and picks up a bowl, Georgia murmurs, “You all right?”

The Reverend Wanda John just says, “God bless,” and won’t meet her glance.

While the others shovel it in at the bow-legged folding tables, Wanda John brings her hands together. “Magnificent Father, we thank you for your blessings, for this food before us, for Your strength to see us through this day. Amen.” Her voice is steady, her hands are not. Gripping the plastic spoon, she scatters cornflakes like confetti. She stops trying, wipes her hands on her lap and bows her head for prayer or privacy.

Min eyes Wanda John, eyes her cereal, then slides the bowl over and downs it. Even though she runs nearby Del’s Ribs and Brew with her husband Antoine (there was a Del, but he got killed in a shootout), Min still eats like she won’t get another chance. Which is how her weight ballooned and why she goes by Min now, rather than the name she was given at birth - Mignonne.

Beside her, Annushka is talking to Sara and laughing, they’re both laughing, like the girls they are. Georgia tears up and looks away -- tears are not allowed here. She remembers not so long ago Annushka could neither laugh nor speak, just showed up one morning hunched over, her curtain of hennaed hair not quite hiding a black eye and a split lip, blood seeping onto her mouth like lip gloss.

But she could look Georgia in the eye and when Georgia asked what happened, the girl almost smiled and shook her head. “My English is --” She batted the air down with one hand.

“That’s okay.” Georgia drew her own hand through the air as though playing a harp. “It’s okay. Try. Show.”

“I. He --” said the girl, then balled her hand into a fist and punched herself in the face.

But that was two months ago and her face and broken ribs have healed. So has her English, as though her language skills have recovered from some trauma, of their own.

Sara speaks no Russian and ought to be focusing on other issues including getting her two kids out of the system and out of foster care. Still, Georgia’s noticed Sara likes to act as Annushka’s translator.

“Some bitch on the street asked Annie why she wasn’t working on her resume,” Sara says.

“I ask-- ” Annushka dissolves in laughter. “I ask lady if she want my job.”

“Annie, my God, oh my God, stop.” Sara’s voice high and tight

between giggles. “I’m going to pee my pants.”

“Why do you call her Annie?” Georgia says.

“Because Annooooshka sounds like an STD.” Sara and half a dozen other women laugh. Annushka smiles, unsure. Sexually transmitted disease may not be in her vocabulary yet.

“Okay, showers.” Georgia sets the clipboard by the coffee urn. The regulars get there first - they know the ropes. The others, the new ones, follow like a stream of ducklings. Georgia comes up behind Sara and murmurs, “Meds.”

Sara rolls her eyes, flashes open her shirt pocket. Georgia sees the pill pack of Depakote -- anti-seizure meds which do double-duty as anti-mania, Sara’s problem. One of them, anyway.

“Good. Did you take it?” As much as Georgia wants to stand over her and make sure, she gives Sara some space. She goes to the foyer, parts the curtains --old cut-up sheets she and the Refuge women stitched together. The whine of construction has already begun. Baldy is still out there, blanket draped over her head as the concrete dust rises around her. Her hands are active, alive, as she signs to herself.

Georgia, whose ASL skills never got beyond what she learned her freshman year at college, squints as Baldy folds her fingers over her palm. It looks like she’s spelling out ASSHOLE.

Georgia turns back. She is alone except for one woman -- Wanda John, who runs her ministry here at the Refuge and in the parking lot of Del’s Ribs and Brew a block away. She is still at the table, rocking back and forth in her seat.

Georgia slips in beside her and picks up the scent coming off her as layered and complex as perfume. Yes, there’s the sharpish tang of alcohol, but also top notes of something sweet, fruity - cough syrup. She’s been robo-dosing.

“How are you doing?” Georgia says, and gets her second you-must-be-crazy look of the day. “You’ll be okay. You knew to come here.”

The other woman shrugs. “Where else m’I gonna go?” She slides deeper into her folding chair so she’s eye-level with Georgia’s arms. “You all goose fleshy. You cold?”

Georgia rubs her arms. “A little.” It has nothing to do with the temperature outside. It has nothing to do with what she’s wearing - she could be wearing polar fleece and flannel and she’d still be cold. She gets chilled when she’s stressed, when she’s overtired, when she’s afraid. Georgia can’t even tell which one she is now, maybe all three. Min calls these chills soul-stealers.
“I’m fine.”

“You sure? You got you some interesting blue feet, too.”

The reverend never misses a thing. Not even now, when life would be easier if she did.

“It’s a long story - but let’s talk about you. I’m worried about you,” Georgia says, then flinches. Too confrontational. If you’re going to show love or concern here, do it like you’re slipping someone a tab of Ecstasy.

“Well, bless your heart,” says the reverend.

“You know, I never knew quite what that meant,” says Georgia.

And Wanda John, who is forty or maybe sixty, smiles at her lap. “That’s the point of it. Means what you like. Something I learned from Mama June.”

Georgia sits up. Wanda John doesn’t talk about her foster parents much, either from denial or survival, so Georgia gathers snatches when she can and tries to piece it all together. “What’d she say?”

“She said, ‘bless your heart,’” says Wanda John, like Georgia might be thick or hard of hearing. “Said it sweet to everyone at church, even said it to Daddy John after she caught him with me. Said it to me every day after that.”

And then she goes silent. When she speaks again, her voice is hard. “At first I thought it was all that Baptist love-thy-neighbor crap in her, but then I figured out that’s what she said because Jesus wouldn’t want her saying ‘I want to slap you something senseless.’”

Georgia opens her mouth but all her reassuring phrases seem right up there with “Bless your heart.” She studies the gray surface of the table, still life with Styrofoam and plastic. Wanda John’s bowl sits empty but for a few clinging cornflakes Min decided weren’t worth the effort. A clear plastic cup, never used by the looks of it, has fallen over. A fuzzy rainbow plays across it, a bit of magic from the sunlight coming through the living window.

And then Georgia remembers, the realization so potent it brings her to her feet. “My God, I almost forgot -- we’re closing on the Refuge today.”

“For true?” Wanda John looks up, her tumble of fair hair framing her pale face. She’s always pale-featured, but today is different. She looks extinguished.

“Of course.” It is proof, or at least the scrap of belief things will turn out all right after all. Months in the works, and they’re finally buying it from the county so Human Services can’t hold them hostage anymore, can’t deny funds for everything the Refuge needs -- new roof tiles, new wiring, new plumbing. It needs fresh paint. It needs love, and Georgia is going to love it back to life.

The reverend’s jaw trembles. “I wasn’t sure. I thought --”

What? That Georgia wants the place for herself? She’d love to see David’s face - guess what, hon, we’re moving.

“Come on, you’re the reason Lourdes and I wanted to get this place. You’re why we formed this fancy corporation.”

Miami Refuge, Inc. sounds like another monster conglomerate, but Al says it’s no big deal. Georgia trusts him because he’s a developer so he knows these things, because he’s on the Refuge board and because he just married Lourdes. Beneath its upmarket name, Miami Refuge, Inc. is just Al, Lourdes and Georgia.
“You can’t just talk about something, you’ve got to do it, too,” Georgia says as much to herself as to Wanda John. “You gotta walk the walk. What’s the scripture thing you said?”

The reverend sighs. “James 2:14. ‘What does it profit, my brethren, if someone says he has faith but doesn’t have works?’”

“Right. Isn’t that what made you start preaching?”

“Part of it.” Wanda John gives a sulky nod. “Didn’t know nothing about preaching when I started.”

“I didn’t know about running a shelter,” Georgia says. “But you stuck with me, anyway.”

“Yeah, but you learned.”

Georgia shakes her head. “Still learning.”

“Me, too. Thought I had it right but I’m still figuring it all out.” The reverend’s voice cracks.

“Same here.” She nudges the reverend’s knee with her own, feels the hard bone. “We’s twins.”

Wanda John surprises Georgia by laughing. “Well bless your heart.”

Georgia thinks back to the time before she left for college, when she went with her father to apply for a car loan. The guy behind the desk looked them over, leaned way back in his tippy executive chair and said, “What can I do for you good people?”

They were good people. But the bank manager didn’t know that. He didn’t know anything about them. So Georgia said, “We’d like all your money, please.”

He blinked and laughed like a car that wouldn’t start - heh. Heheheheh. Heh. Then he tilted back in his chair again and looked at Georgia’s father.

“So. What can I do for you good people?”

And that started her wondering. Good people --what do they look like? She’s come up with different answers different times but right now, Georgia thinks they look like Wanda John.

“So,” she says, “What color should we paint it?”

“Blue,” Wanda John says, dreamy-voiced. “Light, light blue.” The color of her eyes.

And Georgia, who’d wanted, who’d assumed a crisp white, instead of what they have, yellow paint peeling off in curls, now sees the house misty blue, soft, cool, the color of refuge. “Perfect.”

“I always wanted me a blue house.” When Wanda John lets go a sob, Georgia turns to her, but the reverend just sniffs and juts out her jaw like after all she’s been through, she’ll be damned if she’ll give in to tears.

This is the part Georgia hates. She always wants to say, don’t cry, don’t be afraid, don’t give up, but these women have every reason to do all three, so she says, “You want to lie down in my office, hon?”

Wanda John shakes her head. “I want to go to Beluthahatchee.”

“Is that where you’re from?” She’s heard of it, maybe. Somewhere up in the panhandle?

Wanda John laughs her rusty laugh. “Not hardly. It’s something else I learned off Mama June. Told me Beluthahatchee’s where every low-down, rotten thing you’ve done is forgiven.”

“Oh, God,” Georgia says, pulled under the weight of what she’s done, by something she doesn’t even understand, let alone forgive. “I want to go there, too.”

The reverend wipes her eyes with the back of her hand. “Thing is, place doesn’t exist. ‘Cept in a bottle.”