Saving CeeCee Honeycutt by Beth Hoffman

Momma’s scrapbook from its hiding place beneath the mattress. I flipped to the page that held the glossy eight-by-ten color picture that was taken when she was crowned Vidalia Onion Queen. I was right. The party dress Aunt Tootie had bought me was eerily similar to Momma’s pageant dress: crisp white with a full gathered skirt, sleeveless, scoop neck, and a zipper up the back. It even had layers of crinoline petticoats. The only real difference I could see was that Momma’s dress didn’t have a sash at the waist and mine did.
    Momma had been wearing that dress on the day she died, and though her casket had been closed, I imagined she was still wearing it, along with her red shoes, when she was lowered into the ground. It wasn’t a vision I could wipe easily from my mind.
    I closed the scrapbook and shoved it back under the mattress.
    As I smoothed the comforter into place, terrifying thoughts bumped around in my head. What if the dress Aunt Tootie bought me is an omen of the worst possible kind? Has Momma’s illness been passed down to me? Am I genetically doomed? Will it only be a matter of time before my mind corrodes like hers did?
    Wanting the dress as far from sight as possible, I walked to the closet and pushed it all the way to the end of the pole, then I rearranged and fluffed up my other dresses so it all but vanished behind cotton prints, checks, and stripes. With any luck, maybe Aunt Tootie would forget all about it.

Eight
    F riday was a busy day in Aunt Tootie’s house. She was out the door before eight o’clock in the morning to attend a special meeting of the Historic Savannah Foundation. Around nine-thirty, a light blue van rumbled its way down the alley behind the house and parked next to the garage. Two men came through the garden gate, one carrying hedge clippers and a tote bag fi lled with gardening tools, the other pushing a lawnmower. Within minutes I heard the snip, snip of the clippers, and soon the roar of the lawnmower rolled in through the open windows, growing loud, then soft, then loud again as it was pushed up and down the yard.
    Oletta was busy too. With the fan humming at the kitchen ceiling, she was baking bread and cinnamon rolls for Aunt Tootie and me to eat over the weekend. Though I’d lived in this big old house for only a few days, already Oletta and I had established a morning routine. As sweet, yeasty aromas fi lled the air, I’d sit on a stool by the chopping block and read aloud to Oletta from one of my Nancy Drew books.
    “That Nancy Drew sure is smart,” Oletta said, shaping bread dough into a pan. “You read real good too—got yourself a nice voice.”
    Her words made me blush. “I’ve read this book so many times I know it by heart. I looked at the books in Aunt Tootie’s library, but they all seem kinda boring.”
    She slid a bread pan into the oven. “Most all them books was Mr. Taylor’s, rest his sweet soul. Too bad you never got the chance to meet him—finest man I ever did know. A real gentleman.” She shook her head. “They don’t make ’em like him no more.”
    “What did he die from?”
    “Heart attack,” she said, leaning over the stove to set the timer. “He passed away sittin’ in his favorite chair in the library. Oh, how that man loved to read. Every night after supper he’d sit himself down and read till bedtime.”
    Oletta headed for the pantry, and I slid off the stool and followed. “How did he get so rich?”
    “Mr. Taylor bought a lot of land in Florida way, way back,” she said, lifting a sack of flour from the shelf. “When he sold it, he made himself bushels of money. He had something to do with mining too, not coal, but them big stone quarries. He was a powerful man and a kind, kind soul. Usually them two things don’t go together.”
    We returned to the kitchen and I held the canister steady so Oletta could pour in the flour. “Most of the books in the library are history books. He must have liked history a