“It’s never failed me or my mama or daddy,” Ruth said. “It won’t fail you, if you take care of it.”

“Do you do everything they did?” Ivy asked.

A smile tugged at Ruth’s lips. “My mother would have a good laugh at that one. She often said I was hardheaded.”

“You’ve said that about me.”

“Apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.” She poured a liberal amount of oil in the skillet, turned on the burner, and then reached for a bag of flour, which she shook into a bowl. “We’ll salt and pepper it. No one likes a bland piece of chicken.”

Normally Ruth brought fried chicken home after she closed the hotel kitchens on Sunday nights, but this was the first time they had made it together.

Next she poured buttermilk into a bowl, and then she washed and patted dry several room-temp chicken legs. The crackle and pop of the oil sounded extra loud without her mother’s background chatter. Her mother had been gone five years now, and the house was still too quiet.

Ruth carefully dredged the chicken in the buttermilk and then the flour. She coated all the pieces, and as they rested, she plunged the handle of a wooden spoon into the oil and watched as the liquid bubbled around it. “When you see that, you know the oil is just right.” Carefully she lowered a piece into the oil. It hissed and snapped. “Now you do a piece.”

Ivy picked up a leg and hovered over the pan, and then, like her grandmother, she dipped it slowly into the spitting-hot bath. Oil popped up and bit her skin.

“Ouch,” Ivy complained.

Ruth handed her a damp towel. “That’s a part of cooking.”

Ivy studied the red welt. “Maybe I’m not any good at this.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Ruth said. “You’re a natural.”

“Can I work in the Seaside Resort kitchen as a cook?”

“I don’t see why not.”

Ivy started work in the kitchens after school the next day. At first, she was strictly an assistant, and mostly in the early days she sat at a table, did homework, ate a snack, and then folded napkins. She fetched items for Ruth and Mr. Anderson, who, at ninety-two, still cooked beside her grandmother from time to time. By age eleven, she was chopping cabbage for the coleslaw, dicing onions for the Wednesday-night seafood stew, and by the end of middle school she was at the ovens, standing on a step stool, cooking.

The pay wasn’t much. The way Ruth saw it, running the Seaside Resort was a family business, and family was paid the least, including Ruth, who sometimes didn’t draw a paycheck.