both hands on the wheel, which he never does, and looked straight ahead the whole time, and talked the way he talks when he's explaining a breaker panel to a customer: slow, plain, one thing and then the next.
"Your grandma was fifteen in the summer of 1961," he said. "And she was expecting."
I said, "What?"
"Let me get through it, Junie. If I stop I don't know if I'll start again." He downshifted for the hill by the feed store. "There was a boy. She never told me his name, and I didn't ask. He went in the Army. Her daddy found out in June, and in July he drove her up to a place in Clay County called the Bethany Home for Girls, outside a little town called Pine Gap. It was a church home. Not ours. One of those boards out of Louisville that ran places like that. Unwed mothers. You went there when you started to show and you came home when it was over and you told people you'd been at your aunt's in Ohio, and nobody said anything, and that was that. That's how they did it then."
Carla had turned her head and was looking at him.
"She was there seven months," Dad said. "Her daddy wouldn't pay her board, so after the baby came they kept her on in the sewing room to work it off." "They called the girls by their first names and the first letter of their last. No visitors. No phone. They read your letters before they mailed them and they read your letters when they came in. Every morning was chapel and chores, and every afternoon the girls quilted, because the home sold the quilts to pay the bills. Sold 'em to tourists, and to churches up north. Ivy said she put more stitches in during those seven months than in any four years after." He was quiet for a second. "And every few weeks a girl would go into the infirmary at the end of the hall, and come back two or three days later with nothing, and sign some papers, and go home. They didn't let them hold the babies. Didn't tell them boy or girl, most times, though the girls usually found out. They told them it was a clean break. That they'd forget."
"Did she?" I said. "Forget?"
"Junie," said Dad. "Your grandma didn't forget the price of a can of Crisco in 1978."
That was true. She used to quote it at the Kroger in Richmond, loudly, to the cashier.