“Y’all didn’ brung any shoon,” her aunt said with that familiar frown.

“Don’t need shoon in summer,” Anna demurred. Because although she was enjoying herself on the one hand . . . and certainly reveling in the food! . . . she didn’t really want to think to winter. Winter . . . she should be home, shouldn’t she? She never left the house in winter, so all she needed was something to wrap around her feet to keep them warm. She was feeling so healthy now! A couple of months of “fattening up” and she’d be able to be a real help to her Ma. Why, she might be able to get a job, and that would help even more!

“Y’all’re gonna need ’em come winter,” came the discouraging reply. Her heart sank just a little. Surely her Ma would want her back before winter came! And Aunt Jinny was hard enough now. What would she be like when they were both cooped up together in the small space of the cabin?

Supper was the very last of last night’s bean soup, and Jinny set Anna to scrubbing the pot it had cooked in with sand as the next-to-last chore before bedtime. The last chore was to bring wood in from the woodpile, while her aunt set a pot of cornmeal and water onto the hearth to cook into mush overnight, and a pot of beans to soak. But Jinny didn’t seem in any hurry to send her to bed tonight; instead, she poured them both mugs of that herb tea, and indicated that Anna was to sit down in the deepening twilight, while she lit a couple of candles. The scent of honey filled the room; pleasant, and so unlike the stink of the cheap tallow-dips they had used at home.

“I’m a-goin’ ter arst y’all some thin’s,” Aunt Jinny said. “An’ y’all answer me straight.” The way she said it made it an order, and Anna cringed a little.

And what followed was an acutely uncomfortable dissection of the Jones’s daily life, down to exactly who got to eat what. It made Anna blush furiously to reveal their poverty, but the more she told, the more stony-faced Aunt Jinny became, until at last she finished her questions and sat, brooding, staring at the mug of cooling tea she held in both hands.

But what she said, when she finally broke the silence, shocked Anna into near paralysis.

“If I’da knowed y’all was that bad off,” she said, bitterly, “I swan, I’da kidnapped y’all once y’all was weaned. Yore Ma made ’er bed with Lew Jones an’ she kin lay innit. But there ain’t no call ter starve a helpless child that ain’t even wanted.”

What does she mean, I “ain’t even wanted”? How kin she know thet?

Then she looked up at Anna. “I swore I weren’t gonna interfere, not after Lew Jones treated me th’ way he did, but y’all deserve t’hear th’ truth. Y’all’s Ma didn’ want ye.”