“What was Booker thinking! Carrying on in the open with that . . .” Ruby slowed and turned to me. “You remember your grandmother bringing you in here when you was just a kid?”

“I’m sorry, I don’t.”

“Well, she did. Yes, she’d come in here now and then after she’d had a meeting with Mr. Branch, and sometimes she brung you. You was just a tot. You had a root beer float. Sit right here”—she gestured to a booth—“and I’ll be right back with some corn fritters and a root beer float.” She gave me a warm, welcoming smile.

“Your aunt seems so unlike Clarence,” I said when she had left us. “I mean, she’s so warm and friendly. The staff at Summit Drive lives in fear of him.”

“Clarence knows how to make people tremble, all right. He made me and Booker tremble when we were kids. He stepped in to help raise us after our daddy died, and it wasn’t easy. The girls were mostly grown up, but me and Booker, we were a handful, high spirited and full of ourselves. Clarence is stiff and stubborn, and things have to be just so.”

“Like the white gloves.”

“Oh yes, the white gloves. We tried his patience something awful. He was always saying he was giving up on us, but he never did.” He handed me a menu that was sticky with use. A thickset woman, her hair pulled into a tight, shining bun, appeared at our table with a pad in one hand, coffeepot in the other. “This is my sister, Coralee Winters.”

She looked to be a good deal older than Terrence, forty at least, and she licked her pencil with the gravity of a judge writing a verdict rather than a waitress taking an order. She nodded toward my shiner. “Cops do that to you? What’s the world coming to?”

“Not the cops. I got in a fight with a photographer.”

“She got him good,” said Terrence, easing back with a lazy grin. “Knocked him down, busted his camera.”

“Hmm,” said Coralee. “They teach street fighting in Paris, Miss Granville?”

“Please. Call me Roxanne. You knew I lived in Paris?”

“Clarence keeps us up on the Greenes,” said Terrence, and though Coralee’s expression remained unchanged, her balance shifted slightly, and I could swear she kicked Terrence under the table. I flinched to think of the tales Clarence might have carried out of Summit Drive in those years that Julia and Leon were screaming at each other. I let Terrence order for us, and she wrote it down and left.

“You’ll like the food here,” he said. “The women in my family pride themselves on their cooking.”