I wipe my hand across my face. I’m sweating. Miss Celia’s listening with her mouth open, looking dazed.

“I tell her ‘No thank you, Miss Hilly.’ And so she say she pay me fifty cent more and I say, ‘No ma’am. No thank you.’ Then she break my back, Miss Celia. She tell me she know bout the Childs and the Rawleys and all them others that turn me down. Said it was cause she’d made sure everbody knew I was a thief. I’ve never stole a thing in my life but she told everbody I did and wasn’t nobody in town gone hire a sass-mouthing thieving Nigra for a maid and I might as well go head and work for her for free.

“And that’s how come I did it.”

Miss Celia blinks at me.“What, Minny?”

“I tell her to eat my shit.”

Miss Celia sits there, still looking dazed.

“Then I go home. I mix up that chocolate custard pie. I puts sugar in it and Baker’s chocolate and the real vanilla my cousin bring me from Mexico.

“I tote it over to Miss Walters’s house, where I know Miss Hilly be setting round, waiting for the home to come and get her mama, so she can sell that house. Go through her silver. Collect her due.

“Soon as I put that pie down on the countertop, Miss Hilly smiles, thinking it’s a peace offering, like that’s my way a showing her I’m real sorry bout what I said. And then I watch her. I watch her eat it myself. Two big pieces. She stuff it in her mouth like she ain’t ever eaten nothingso good. Then she say, ‘I knew you’d change your mind, Minny. I knew I’d get my way in the end.’ And she laugh, kind a prissy, like it was all real funny to her.

“That’s when Miss Walters, she say she getting a mite hungry too and ask for a piece a that pie. I tell her, ‘No ma’am. That one’s special for Miss Hilly.’

“Miss Hilly say, ‘Mama can have some if she wants. Just a little piece, though. What do you put in here, Minny, that makes it taste so good?’

“I say ‘That good vanilla from Mexico’ and then I go head. I tell her what else I put in that pie for her.”

Miss Celia’s still as a stone staring at me, but I can’t meet her eyes now.

“Miss Walters, her mouth fall open. Nobody in that kitchen said anything for so long, I could a made it out the door fore they knew I’s gone. But then Miss Walters start laughing. Laugh so hard she almost fall out the chair. Say, ‘Well, Hilly, that’s what you get, I guess. And I wouldn’t go tattling on Minny either, or you’ll be known all over town as the lady who atetwo slices of Minny’s shit.’ ”

I sneak a look up at Miss Celia. She’s staring wide-eyed, disgusted. I start to panic that I told her this. She’ll never trust me again. I walk over to the yellow chair and sit myself down.

“Miss Hilly thought you knew the story. That you were making fun a her. She never would a pounced on you if I hadn’t done what I did.”

Miss Celia just stares at me.

“But I want you to know, if you leave Mister Johnny, then Miss Hilly done won the whole ball game. Then she done beat me, she beat you . . .” I shake my head, thinking about Yule May in jail, and Miss Skeeter without any friends left. “There ain’t many people left in this town that she ain’t beat.”

Miss Celia’s quiet awhile. Then she looks over at me and starts to say something, but she shuts her mouth back.

Finally, she just says,“Thank you. For . . . telling me that.”

She lays back down. But before I close the door, I can see her eyes are wide smack open.

THE NEXT MORNING, I find Miss Celia’s finally managed to get herself out of bed, wash her hair, and put all that makeup on again. It’s cold outside so she’s back in one of her tight sweaters.

“Glad to have Mister Johnny back home?” I ask. Not that I care, but what I do want to know is if she’s still fiddling with the idea of leaving.

But Miss Celia doesn’t say much. There’s a tiredness in her eyes. She’s not so quick to smile at every little thing. She points her finger out the kitchen window. “I think I’ll plant a row of rosebushes. Along the back of the property.”

“When they gone bloom?”

“We should see something by next spring.”