April lit the lamp’s wick and adjusted it to the right level. Nanny Lucy fussed if there was black soot on the chimney when it was time to leave the cellar. She crossed the narrow room to where the shelves were built in to hold jars and jars of canned fruits, jams, and vegetables. These days they were sparse, which meant that Nanny Lucy hadn’t done much preserving in her final years, but there were still more than a dozen jars of peaches crammed up in one corner. And back behind them, lying on its side, was an almost full bottle of Jack Daniel’s bourbon.

“I’m surprised you didn’t find this, Nanny Lucy,” April whispered as she opened the bottle and took the first long drink. “I left it here years ago, but the storm stirred up too many memories tonight. You telling me that you had sinned reminded me of my own sin in hiding it on your property. I’m not an alcoholic, but tonight I need a drink, or two or three. I can’t imagine you ever sinning.” She sat down on the end of the cot and threw the quilt off her shoulders. “I actually thought that you had angel wings under those cardigan sweaters you always wore. There was no way I could ever measure up to . . .”—she turned the bottle up again and then wiped her mouth with the back of her hand—“someone as perfect as you, so somewhere along the line I stopped trying. I just wanted you to love me, Nanny Lucy, but evidently you thought I was unlovable. How could you put Aunt Gabby on a pedestal and your own daughter in a deep hole?”

The storm raged, both outside and inside April’s heart, as she kept taking drinks right out of the bottle. She could visualize her grandmother sitting in the old ladder-back chair at the end of the cot and giving her dirty looks.

“Well, at least I didn’t disappoint you.” April held the bottle up toward the empty chair. “I’m just as worthless as my mother. There will never be angel wings on my back or a halo above my head.”

When the bottle was half-empty, she screwed the cap back on it, set it on the concrete floor, and curled up on the cot in a fetal position. “I think I’m drunk, Nanny Lucy. That’s one more thing you can send me to my room for doing. ‘Go on in there and be just like your mother.’ That’s what you used to tell me. I hated that room because I thought it was what made me . . .” She passed out and dreamed of her grandmother slamming the door to her old bedroom.