He put down the paper and looked up at her. “This opinion piece ran a couple of weeks ago in the Anniston Star, right here in Alabama. And to my knowledge, nobody has burned the newspaper office or lynched the editor.” He squinted at her. “Do you think I ought to run it, Liz?”

“Well, I don’t know,” Lizzy said hesitantly. “Lots of Darling folks might not be too anxious to hear about what Mussolini is doing. Jed Snow says that he’s a Fascist dictator. He’s taken over the government. He’s outlawed political parties. He—”

“Yes to all that, Liz.” Charlie heaved a heavy sigh. “Jed’s right, of course. Mussolini is a dictator. But he gets things done, damn it. He gets things done.” He threw the paper down on the desk, pulled off his eyeshade, and dropped his head in his hands. “Why can’t we have a government that gets things done?”

Lizzy didn’t have an answer to that question. Instead, she said, “If I have a piece of news—important news—that I can’t turn in until Thursday noon, will there still be room for it?”

“Depends on how long it is and how urgent.” Charlie shrugged heavily. “I could cut Mrs. Campbell Young’s bridge party, I guess. Or I could move the Mercantile ad to the back page. Or—”

“Thanks,” Lizzy said, and fled.

When she got to her block on Jeff Davis, Lizzy could see her mother sitting out on the front porch. Not wanting to confront her just yet, she cut through Mrs. Hoffman’s side yard, walked up the alley, and entered her mother’s kitchen, letting the screen door slap shut behind her.

“Don’ slam that screen.” Sally-Lou didn’t look up from the piecrust she was rolling out on the pine-topped table. “How many times I gots to tell you, Miz Lizzy? You know yo’ mama don’ like it.” She was wearing her usual gray uniform dress, neatly pressed, and a white apron. On the table beside her was a metal pie tin, the bottom crust heaped with sliced peaches and topped with dots of butter and a sprinkle of cinnamon.

“Sorry,” Lizzy said automatically, reflecting that one of the pleasures of being grown-up and having her own house was being able to slam the screen whenever she felt like it.

Sally-Lou gave a final push to the rolling pin. “Yo’ mama out on the front porch, where it’s cool. She makin’ a list of all the things that’s gots to be done afore we move ’cross the street to yo’ house.”

Oh, dear, Lizzy thought, and her stomach clenched. There was going to be another big argument, and she hated arguments. But there was something else that had to be taken care of before she could tell her mother that there would be no move.

“Sally-Lou,” she said, “I wonder if you could go over to Miss Hamer’s house this evening and have a little visit with DessaRae.”

There was a silence. “Might could.” Sally-Lou rolled the piecrust around the rolling pin and then neatly unrolled it over the top of the peaches in the pie tin, something that Lizzy had tried to do a hundred times and failed every time. “Why fo’ would I be visitin’ with Aunt Dessy?”