“As soon as I reached Aunt Queen on the car phone I described the situation to her and asked if I might instruct Grady Breen to purchase a decent house for Terry Sue and her children. The title should be in our name with full insurance of every sort, and the woman would need furniture, appliances, new kitchenware, the works.

“ ‘You can’t imagine this level of poverty,’ I explained. ‘And this woman hits her children and I haven’t begun to figure what to do about that except it might stop if the house and the conditions were improved. At least I hope so. As for Tommy, he’s brilliant.’ I filled in all the relevant details.

“Of course she wanted to call Grady herself. But I said it was something I had to do. It was a job of maturity and it was important.

“Within half a minute I had Grady on the phone. We agreed that the woman’s house had to be in a moderately priced new development outside of Ruby River City, Autumn Leaves being the ideal tract according to Grady, with all new construction, new appliances, new pots and pans, new everything, and that she had to have a full-time cleaning woman and a full-time nanny for the children.

“Grady would become her personal financial advisor and financial guardian. We’d pay the taxes, insurance, utilities, television cable and hired help direct. And of course Terry Sue had to have an income, and we decided upon one that was about equal to what she would have earned as a secretary in Grady’s office. We thought that would give her a real spiritual lift.

“ ‘It’s foolproof,’ I said. ‘The nanny and the cleaning woman will be working for you, and Terry Sue will have no call whatsoever to hit her kids. In front of those people she probably will be ashamed to hit her kids.’

“Meantime Brittany would switch over to the Catholic school that Tommy was attending, the only Catholic school in Mapleville and one with the cachet of a private prep school, and we’d get some medical help for the little girl Bethany, who didn’t talk.

“As for the mysterious Charlie who had walked out of Terry Sue’s life, according to Grady, he wasn’t ‘all that bad by any stretch,’ but the baby in Terry Sue’s arms wasn’t his and he was a bit disgusted that the real father hadn’t stepped up, and who that might be was open to question.

“I advised Grady to have a DNA test done to determine if this baby had been fathered by Pops. I felt it was only right to do so. I had a deep suspicion that Pops was the father, that the baby had been conceived in the aftermath of Sweetheart’s death, and that Charlie didn’t know what to do about it.