The Roots of the Olive Tree by Courtney Miller Santo Page B

her tears and asked, “What does it mean?”
    Bets translated the first bit before Erin could answer. “Holy Beauty. Child of Nature.”
    “It was lovely. I wish I could have been there.” Her mother reached for her hand and then stopped, deciding instead to tuck a strand of Erin’s hair behind her ear. “Just lovely.”
    A bell rang and all around them visitors gathered their possessions and made a stab at last embraces. Guards were supposed to allow only a quick hug and a kiss, but they turned their eyes from the children clinging to their mothers’ legs and let the women with infants walk with them cradled in their arms right up to the door. Deb’s good-byes were quick and followed the guidelines exactly. She tried to hold on to Erin a bit longer, but she pulled away from her mother after just seconds into her embrace. It was Bets who turned for one last wave as she walked through the door.
    In the car, more than an hour into the drive, Erin asked Bets why she’d changed the subject when she’d finally found the courage to ask Deb about the murder.
    “Why did you take her side, Bets? I have a right to know why she did it.”
    “It isn’t the sort of question you can surprise a woman with.”
    “It wasn’t a surprise. It’s what I’ve wanted to ask her my whole life.”
    “But you know what happened. There’s no hidden complication, no other suspect. Your mother shot your father during an argument. What you need most is to get to know each other again.”
    “I’ve never known her. I don’t even know what Deb does all day in that place.”
    “You mean your mother?” Bets narrowed her eyes. “It’s all quite routine. Get up. Wait. Get dressed. Wait. Eat breakfast. Wait.”
    “She must do something,” Erin insisted.
    “There’s television and the other inmates.”
    “So she has friends?”
    “No. Not exactly. They’re more like—”
    “Frenemies?” She’d learned the word this summer reading Seventeen .
    “Is that what you call it these days?” Bets smiled. “Then yes.”
    Erin was silent for a while. She pushed the car to go faster and was thrilled when Bets didn’t seem to notice they were flying by the other cars. She had been angry the whole day at her mother, about her mother, and now that she was behind the wheel—only the second or third time since she got her permit—she felt the anger slip away, and a sadness that she’d always had overcame her. “I should have asked her about that instead. Asked her about her friends, about what she does with all her time.”
    Bets sounded tired. “She wouldn’t have told you. Deb waited nearly ten years to see you. She wanted nothing more than to hear your voice and let you tell her about your life.”
    “Then you can tell me what it’s been like for her.”
    “I can’t. That’s why I brought you today. You need to see it, to hear it in her voice.” Bets leaned her head against the window. “Slow down.”
    Erin eased up on the accelerator but stayed in the carpool lane. “Why won’t Grandma Callie come?”
    “God only knows,” said Bets, closing her eyes. “My daughter has a stone heart.”
    Erin had never thought of Callie as cold. It was Bets who distanced herself from the other women, and this trip had begun to change Erin’s perception of Bets. There was a tiredness about her—because of the strained relationship with her daughter Callie, and the dementia that had taken her husband away from her. Erin wanted to erase some of the distance between Bets and all those she loved. With an open face, she turned to ask Bets about Callie, what she’d been like as a girl, but as she did, she heard her great-grandmother’s snoring. Erin pushed down on the accelerator, turned on the radio, and instead began to wonder what her grandmothers’ lives would have been like if she’d not come to live with them.

CHAPTER TWELVE
    The Other Side
    T he hearing started late. The heat of the room made every second seem like a