“I sold them, Marjorie,” I said. “I sold the kettles, the recipe binder, the plant, and the name. In September, to a candy company in Chicago, for eight million five hundred thousand dollars.” The mother of the husband of Tammy, a thin, silvery woman in a dress the color of cream who had called me a sweet old mama, did not drop the paper. She is too well bred for that. But her fingers tightened on it until the edges crumpled, and her eyes moved from the copper rim to my face. “Line nine of the schedule is these three kettles, with the initials of my husband. Clyde made them in 1974 in our garage. The buyer owns every one.”
Tammy had come down off the hay bale. She is forty six, a glossy, narrow woman with the long chin of her father, and I could see her calculating, quickly, the way she used to do arithmetic in the packing room at fourteen, her lips moving. “Mama,” she said, “that is not funny.” I said, “It is not meant to be.” She said, “You sold the company without telling me.” I said, “I did.” She said, “Why?” I looked at her, at the pink boxes with the gold ribbon, and at the three hammered kettles shining under the chandeliers, and I said the plain truth. “Because I thought you wanted what I had more than you wanted me.”
Marjorie Hollis turned slowly to her daughter in law. “Tammy,” she said, “you told me these kettles were antiques from an estate sale.” Tammy said, “In a way they are.” Marjorie said, “You told my son that the recipes were all yours. You said you had developed them in your kitchen.” Her voice was cool and dry as paper. “I have eaten that brittle for forty years at the peanut festival, dear. I know whose it is.” The husband of Tammy, a big, handsome, bewildered man named Dale, stood behind the tasting table with a tray of samples in his hands and said nothing. He looked as if he wanted to put the tray down and could not find the table.
A hand hammered copper kettle with two letters on its rim brought a mother in law across a barn floor and gave one candy maker the night to bring her daughter back to the stove.
Tammy drew herself up. She is a proud woman, and I will say this for her: she did not plead. She walked to the table and stood facing me, three feet away, in her cream silk dress. “All right,” she said. “I took them. I took the binder, and the kettles. The company was never going to use them the way they should be used. They were going to melt them for the copper, Mama, or put them in a museum. I wanted them to be loved.” She pressed a hand to her chest. “And I wanted to be the one to do it. For once. I wanted you to look at what I made.”
The words were strange, and yet I knew them. I had said them myself, once, in a kitchen in 1976, to my own mother, who had thought my candy was a silly idea. I looked at my daughter, at her trembling mouth and her beautiful, furious eyes, and I saw the little girl who used to stand on a stool in the packing room, wrapping brittle in wax paper and saying, Mama, look. And I had been so busy, so tired, so proud of my plant, that I had said, in a minute, honey.
“Tammy,” I said, “I am going to tell you something I should have said thirty years ago.” The barn was silent. “Your candy is good. The pink box is good. The gold ribbon is good. The idea that you could make a Southern confection that was elegant, and not an old fair thing in a plastic bag, is a good idea. I never said so because I was afraid.” I felt tears start. “I was afraid you would be better than me.” My daughter stared. A tear slid down her cheek and cut a line in her powder. “Mama,” she whispered. “You never said.”
“I am saying now,” I said. “And here is what I want to do.” I stood up straight, and I felt Clyde standing a little behind my right shoulder, as he always had, with his big arm resting on the back of my chair. “I will ask the company in Chicago to license the brittle recipe to you, for one dollar a year. I will ask them to lend you the kettles. In exchange, you will tell the truth on your label. Not the old recipe of your mother. The recipe of Clyde and Myrtle, made new by Tammy.” I looked at the three kettles. “And you will put his initials on the lid of every box.”
She wept then, openly, without any elegance at all. She came around the table and put her arms around me, and I felt the silk and the powder and the perfume, and under it, the thin, strong bones of a child I had held at the hospital in Dothan forty six years before. We stood there for a while. The crowd, which had been so quiet, began to make small noises. The string quartet, to its eternal credit, struck up a slow waltz, uncertain at first, and then more sure. And in the corner, Dale Hollis put down his tray of samples at last.
The company in Chicago said yes, as it happened. Southern Confections by Tammy opened the next spring in a rented kitchen on Main Street, with a banner that read, in gold letters: Brittle by Clyde and Myrtle, made new by Tammy. She spent six months learning the cooking temperatures in my kitchen, standing at the stove in an apron, stirring the thirty gallon kettle with a long wooden paddle. The first batch scorched. The second was soft. The third was perfect, amber and brittle and shining, and she cried when she cracked it.
At the National Peanut Festival that November, she and I set up a booth. A card table, a hand lettered sign, and a pot of brittle breaking in sheets on wax paper. The fairgoers lined up. A boy of eight bought a bag for a dollar and bit into it right there, with his mother watching. He said, with his mouth full, “It tastes like a hundred years.” Tammy and I looked at each other. Then she reached into the pocket of her apron and brought out a little brass tag, which she had punched herself, with the two letters C and W, and she pinned it, very carefully, over the heart of my sweater.
