She even told me she learning how to sell and market food, and can show me how to sell my barbecue sauce in them fancy upscale type a stores. That I can get my picture on the bottle if I want to. Hell, I mean, heck, I can’t take so much excitement at one time, but I’m trying to get used to a whole lotta thangs, including missing Viola. I thank she knew exactly what she was doing when she passed, ’cause she done caused a whole lotta good for all of us.

With that insurance money she left me, I took it and bought her a beautiful headstone and had her picture put on it—the one I got from the kids, with her new teeth and slim body. She’d get a chuckle outta that, I know she would. Me and the kids chipped in and gave the church where she was baptized some money to start a memorial fund in her name that’s gon’ send a bunch of little ones to sleepaway camp in the summer. Viola’d get a kick outta knowing something was being done in her honor. The rest of the money I used to put a down payment on a nice four-bedroom tract house in a neighborhood where the kids can go to a good school. They don’t need to catch no buses. It ain’t but four or five black families in our subdivision, but it don’t make me no difference. It’s still a whole lotta vacant lots and seem like they finish a new house every other week, so it should be some more folks moving in real soon.

And as soon as Chanterella get weaned off breast milk, Brenda say, as long as she ain’t gotta give up going to choir practice on Tuesdays and Thursdays, she be more than happy to help run the Shack, ’cause she said she got skills she ain’t never had a chance to use. I told her one thang we doing is changing the name to something a little classier. It ain’t gon’ be no shack, that much we already know. We found a nice spot about ten minutes from where we live, but Brenda worried that black folks won’t drive all the way out there for no barbecue. I told her black people will drive as far as they have to for a good bone to suck on, and, besides, white folks like barbecue, too. Our food ain’t prejudiced, and this time around I ain’t hiring nobody that can’t be bonded, or operating nowhere we gots to keep a gun hid underneath the counter.

I could probably sit out here all day, ’cause it smell just like I imagine a rain forest would. It’s getting nice and cool, too. Just the way I like it. I guess I feel brave enough to do this now, so I take Vy’s letter from inside my jacket pocket, unfold it, and start reading to myself:

June 9, 1994

Dear Cecil: