It was three months later that he called her up and asked if he could take her out for her birthday. Apparently, whatever compunction he had about dating a sixteen-year-old was put to rest by the occasion of her turning seventeen.

Looking back on the entire episode from the distant vantage point of being twenty, Dolly, puffing on her cigarette, thought she should have realized that his caution—the very steadfastness and step-back-and-think that she had so admired—would prove an inconvenience once she was married to him.

Sometimes she just couldn’t believe she had unwittingly married a man so like her father. She had spent her life subverting her father’s best intentions for her, his cautionary tales of what good girls ought not to do. She would listen carefully to all his reasons why, and then go out and do exactly what he had said not to—not out of spite, but because she never found his reasons compelling enough to heed. He had been especially upset about the flight lessons—but then, so had Byron, although she hadn’t even been married to him yet when she sank her life savings from seven years of babysitting into three lessons in a two-seated Piper Cub. It had been worth it, though, the feeling of soaring under her own control, even just for a moment, when the instructor had let her take it on her own. “How could you think this was a good idea?” both Byron and her father had sputtered, separately, when they’d found out, and both were deaf to her protests that the WASPs had had a fine record in the war and that, had she been only slightly older, she would have joined.

With Byron’s reaction to her deepest dream, she should have realized her mistake, that the romance she had infused him with was all of her own invention.

Ever since their wedding, “I don’t think so, Doll” seemed to be Byron’s favorite phrase. Sometimes he’d laugh a little when he said it, as though he thought she was cute for thinking of whatever foolish thing she had just proposed. Of course, when he wanted to uproot her from her hometown, take her away from her family and friends, so he could go into business with an Army buddy, did she have the option of saying, “I don’t think so, Byron”? Of course not.

Stretching her bare toes toward the ceiling, she inhaled of her cigarette. “I don’t think so, Byron,” she said aloud to the night, just to see how it would sound.

Chapter 3

Decorating is the loving interest and attention given to a home in order to bring out the beauty of everyday things. It can be an expression of your interest in your family, and it can enrich your family life by endowing it with more graciousness.

—Popular Home Decoration, 1940

HOME OF MRS. CECILIA FRYT.
412 W. First Street, Pine Rapids
Tuesday, June 20, 1950