Just as her mother had abandoned her, Deborah immediately abandoned Chino—and the same Mrs. Hardin, now in her sixties, took in the baby and raised him, too, as her own. She was a strict grandmother: she had grown up in a place and time when disobedient kids were told to go to the woods to find a branch to be beaten with. It was called “picking your switch.” But, at the same time, she was an old woman, and her powers to discipline, or to understand this new little child, were fading.
