“Someday you and Mary will have this house, and your children after that,” John had said, to press him further. “The house your grandfather built. Your mother and I insist on it. You’ll stay at the bank, Jack, and fill my shoes when I’m gone. You’re the oldest, and you know as well as I do that your brother Harry isn’t the type for it. And this town needs us, Jack.”

Needs us like it needs a hole in the head, Jack had always thought, but he went to work every day and didn’t make a fuss, all these years. He guessed he could have taken over his father’s cheese factory or creamery, but he knew nothing about either and had no desire to learn. There was a university-certified master cheesemaker at the factory who would surely resent the intrusion. Besides, the offices at the bank were nicer. And it turned out Jack had made the right choice, because both the factory and the creamery had been burned in the 1933 milk strikes by arsonists, farmers angered by falling prices and rising production costs. So that was the end of the Mickelson family’s foray into the dairy industry. Things being what they were, John had decided not to rebuild, though others had continued to expand the industry in town, and, recently, with the war, it had boomed.

The bank wasn’t so bad. Jack guessed it had been in part due to his efforts that they had kept it afloat during the Depression, with his father distraught over his personal misfortune in the stock market crash. Jack didn’t really find the work interesting, but what was the difference, really? He brought home a good paycheck, and made a stable home for Mary and JJ and Elissa, which was what mattered. Jack adored his wife—the way she loved him despite himself, the way she steadied him with her quiet grace. And when first his son, JJ, and then his daughter, Elissa, were born, he thought to himself, This is why not me; this is why I made it through that hell, for them. Appreciating the miracle of their tiny hands sculpting him into someone real again, when they touched him.

And now, though the Depression had indeed taken a bite out of the family’s wealth, Jack’s children still stood to inherit tidy sums, especially since his father had often commented that Jack was the only one of the Mickelson children to have paid his dues to the family, suggesting that Harry and Jinny wouldn’t get much of the family’s money.