Without Prejudice by Andrew Rosenheim

but it’s awful hot for them in Mississippi. But come summer there’d be peaches as big as baseballs – there’s nothing better than a good peach pie, especially with home-made ice cream. You had to work so hard making ice cream back then it made it taste extra good.’
    She was chopping cabbage for coleslaw, made with oil and so much vinegar his eyes popped eating it. He loved its sourness.
    ‘Please sit down with me, Vanetta.’
    ‘Let me just finish this, baby.’ When she had she went to the fridge and took out a bottle of Pepsi and a snowball – two coconut-coated balls of rubbery fluff surrounding chocolate cake with a cream centre. She cut one of them in half and put it on a plate before him, then opened the Pepsi and poured a couple of ounces out for him into a plastic cup. Then she sat down at the table, too. Biting into the other half of the snowball, she nodded appreciatively and closed her eyes, dreamlike.
    ‘Hard to believe spring is ever going to show up – but it always does. Only I can’t remember a winter as cold as this. Seems like the snow’s forgot to stop.’ She picked up a deck of playing cards she’d had on the table and started laying out her own, semi-impossible game of solitaire. Bobby hated it because you almost never won. But he liked to watch her play, liked staring at her hands, their rich deep brown with pinkish half-moons around the cuticles. The brown skin meant she was a Negro. He understood that now, and he had laughed like someone in the know when she’d told him about the little boy in another household who’d complained that her skin was always dirty.
    Now he asked, ‘Was there ever snow in Mississippi?’
    ‘Almost never,’ she said. ‘Cotton don’t like snow, so snow’s not allowed there.’
    He laughed at the ridiculous logic of this and Vanetta laughed too.
    She picked up a card off the table, held it thoughtfully against her mouth for a moment, then put it down at the end of the longest row. ‘You is distracting me, Bobby, so I’m going to lose.’
    ‘Sorry,’ he said.
    She laughed again; she was always laughing. ‘Don’t worry, I was going to lose anyway.’ She collected the cards in a pile and sorted them, then put the pack down on the table. Finishing her Pepsi, she stood up. ‘I got supper to make now. You want to help, or you want to go watch TV?’
    ‘What’s for supper?’
    ‘Baked chicken. And rice, and slaw.’
    Of course, it was Friday – his least favourite day because it meant the advent of the weekend when there was no Vanetta. She cooked by an invariable schedule: Monday was pot roast (yuck), Tuesday was ribs with barbecue sauce, Wednesday soy-soaked hamburgers, and Thursday – well, Thursday was pot luck according to his father, which could mean anything, Chinese takeaway if they were lucky, his father’s adored lamb kidneys if they weren’t, which made Bobby want a dog even more than usual, since then he could have slipped the offal to the dog.
    Recently Thursday was even dodgier than the food, because every other week Merrill had taken to coming to supper, and Vanetta would stay late. Then they ate in the dining room, rather than around the kitchen table, and he and Mike had to comb their hair and change their shirts. Merrill wore a dress and usually had a necklace on, which Lily seemed happy to imitate. Merrill would insist on proper conversation, which only his father and Lily seemed to enjoy. They discussed issues with a capital ‘I’ – the worsening situation in Vietnam, Richard Nixon, sometimes (with lowered voices and an eye on the swing door to the kitchen) the growing unrest among the Negro population. The discussion was as formal as school to Bobby, and as dull. Once when Mike made a silly face, Bobby laughed uncontrollably, and his father sent him to his bedroom, where he cried until Vanetta came to say goodnight and slipped him a bacon sandwich in a napkin.
    Now he watched as Vanetta took jointed chicken pieces on a