My grandmother took me to church every Sunday. Occasionally, my mother would go as well, but most times it was just my grandmother and me. I remember the heat and the congregation flapping their Order of Services in their faces when the fans weren’t working, the organ that sounded like it was wheezing with asthma, the drone of the minister’s voice. I always had the feeling that she attended to be seen there. Before church every Sunday, she would make up the dough for the bread, the Yorkshire pudding, and the cake that we would have for dessert. She also baked special soft bread that Esther could chew. I watched her kneading and pounding the dough on the board as if she were suffocating the life out of it, as if moulding it and then destroying it gave her a control that was lacking in anoth
