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

And this, by the way, was how Nana taught me math: She’d say, ‘Okay, we have two dollars for lunch for three people. If baloney costs this much and bread costs that, and you want a piece of candy, how much baloney can we afford?’ Leave it to her to turn being broke into a game.
    “Anyway, there were leaks in the roof of the car, and it was raining as hard on us inside as it was out. We were laughing so much we almost choked on our sandwiches.”
    • • •
    Wed. Nov. 19
    Breakdown outside Myrtle Beach 12:45 P.M. Very desolate road, no houses. Charlie going for tow car
.
    “Looking back on that now—the wife and child stay behind in the broken-down car on the side of the road …” Mom shakes her head and sighs. “That could have turned out very badly. But that’s what we did.”
    Charlie came back with tow car at 1:40. Staying at tourist cabin. Waiting for car to be fixed
.
    • • •
    Friday, Nov. 21
    Yippee! Crossed Florida state line at 4:46
.
    “We got out and kissed Bessie’s old fenders,” Mom says. “The ocean was on one side of the road, and there were groves of orange trees on the other, and you could take as many oranges as you wanted. After those barren winters in Saratoga, being in this place felt like anything was possible.
    “A little while later, we got pulled over by a state trooper. We thought,
What now?
He took a look at our license plate and said, ‘Do you mean to tell me that you-all drove here all the way from New York in
this
car?’ Daddy said, ‘Yes, sir, we did.’ And the trooper said, ‘Well, God bless, and welcome to Florida.’ ”
    • • •
    They moved into a small apartment complex of white stucco buildings on Biscayne Bay, one block from thebeach. The rent for a studio with a kitchen and a small sleeping alcove was eighteen dollars a week—very reasonable for Miami in November. The owner was a Mrs. Krauser, an elderly lady in a wheelchair whose beautiful daughter lived with her because, as Mrs. Krauser whispered, “She had an unfortunate marriage.”
    Among their neighbors were the Garretts, whose four children absorbed Carolyn into their fold instantly. They took her to the abandoned naval base at the end of the block, where the buildings were half sunk in the mud. The neighborhood kids were forbidden to go there, so of course that’s where they went to play. The Garrett clan also took Carolyn on bottle runs. People moved in and out of the neighborhood all the time according to the season or the availability of work, and the kids would descend on any newly vacant apartments looking for bottles to redeem for candy money. When enough bottles were collected, one of the parents would stand at the corner and watch as the group of children crossed the multiple lanes of Biscayne Boulevard to get to the convenience store on the other side.
    Mr. Garrett worked at the local banana packaging plant, and he regularly brought home office supplies.“Maw,” one of the kids would drawl, “can you make us banana and peanut butter sandwiches?” Soon the Kallahers were making their own banana sandwiches with the extras Mr. Garrett dropped off at their door.
    On Friday nights Mr. and Mrs. Garrett would take their kids and Carolyn to the drive-in movie theater. There was an extra charge for children, so all the kids would pile in the back, and Mrs. Garrett would throw a blanket over them and tell them to be still and keep quiet—far too great a challenge for the five of them. The ticket taker would see the blanket shaking with fits of giggles, with sounds of
shhhhhh!
and more giggles coming from under it, and say, “Oh, just the two of you? Here you go, have a nice time.”
    Charlie heard about carpentry work right away, but getting it was another story. Most of the construction jobs in Miami were union run, and he wasn’t a member. That left the option of going to a certain corner where men gathered in the hopes of being picked for day labor. Most of them came by themselves,