Cherries in Winter: My Family's Recipe for Hope in Hard Times by Suzan Colón

checked the clock—it was too early for Charlie to be back, unless something was wrong. She looked out the window. Becoming clearer in the pitch-blackness of the country night was a car, its motor turned off and headlights out, coasting up to the house.
    “Who’s that?” Carolyn whispered, feeling her mother go stiff.
    The car sat in the driveway for a few minutes.
Maybe
they’re lost?
Matilda wondered. Then two men got out, looked around, and began slowly walking around the house.
    The Kallahers had no phone, and the closest neighbor was a mile away.
    “
Happy!
” Matilda whispered for the dog. “Happy, where the hell are you? Get out there and bark, you son of a bitch.” As she dragged the mutt out from under the bed, she felt his heart thudding and skipping as badly as her own.
    There were four entrances to the house: the main and back doors, and two doors in the servants’ quarters where the kitchen was. Matilda and Carolyn quickly tiptoed downstairs and began pushing furniture—tables, chairs, a chest of drawers, anything—in front of the doors. There was nothing they could do about the windows. Matilda grabbed a poker from the fireplace and ran with Carolyn to the very back of the house. She hid her shaking daughter under a couch and put her finger to her lips. Then she stood by a window, wielding the poker like a baseball bat as they heard a doorknob rattling.
    They stayed there even after the sound of footsteps on the gravel got fainter and the car went away, andthey came out only when the sun did. The next day Charlie had a phone installed.
    Even that Matilda had been able to get through, but there was a sense of mounting desperation in her now. She remembered first having this feeling when she was ten years old. Riordan had finally married her mother after being forced by a judge to provide for his bastard children—now three in total—and his sisters had found a small apartment for them near the family’s brownstone in Jersey City.
    “I’m not going, Grandpa,” Matilda said.
    “You have to, kid,” Peter told her. He’d asked Carrie to leave Matilda with him in the Bronx, but the suddenly clan-oriented Riordan had refused. It had taken every ounce of Peter’s will not to make Carrie a new widow.
    Matilda tried not to cry in front of her grandpa. “I don’t want to go with them. I want to stay here, with you.” That was it; she started sobbing.
    “I know, I know,” her grandfather said in his soft German accent, wrapping his big arms around her. “But I’ll come visit you all the time. And I’ll tell you what, kid: You be a good girl and go quietly, and I’ll get you a new bike. What do you say?”
    Grandpa was as good as his word, and Matildabrought her brand-new bicycle with her when she was taken to Jersey City. After one day with her father, Matilda called Grandpa to tell him that the bike was very nice, and if he didn’t come and get her she was going to ride it off the top of the building. He arrived the next morning to take her home.
    Now Matilda could feel chill air coming in through the window panes, and with it came the same feeling of despair. Soon they’d be in the thick of another Saratoga winter, where the snow fell so hard it could block the door, and Matilda, away from her family for the first time in her life, might go for days without seeing a soul other than her husband and daughter. Living on this farm was too hard, even after all she’d been through. Every day was a struggle, and every night more sadness crept into the house. Charlie’s high dreams of being a farmer hadn’t panned out, and he’d sit silent in his Morris chair, unavailable to either her or Carolyn, on whom he’d always doted.
    Something had to be done. So, after discussing the situation with seven-year-old Carolyn (there was no one else to talk to), Matilda had taken matters into her own hands.
    From the window Matilda watched Charlie comehome from work and go to the barn to milk the cows. She