It was one of those glorious golden fall days that took the sting out of everything’s dying, and Cecilia Fryt was setting up her parlor in preparation for the second bridge club meeting of the fall. She had put the quilt frames up in the attic at the end of August, after the completion of the Wild Goose Chase quilt. On display for three weeks in September, the quilt had enticed the congregation to buy hundreds of tickets for the church bazaar raffle. When everything was tallied afterward, Cecilia was satisfied that this year’s had been one of the most successful fund-raisers the church had seen. They were still just shy of enough money to buy the new organ, but Cecilia had a few ideas what to do about that.

She had just set up the fourth card table when she heard a strange buzzing sound far away outside. An airplane, again! She had heard one last week about this same time. She had to know what on earth was going on—airplanes almost never were heard above Pine Rapids. The nearest airport was in Wausau, and Pine Rapids wasn’t exactly on the way anywhere.

Hurrying as fast as her aching bones would allow, Cecilia made it out to the front porch just in time to see the small red and white plane swoop low over her house, so close she could almost feel its vibrations under her skin. “Of all the nerve!” she said out loud, standing with arms akimbo, watching as the plane zoomed away, rising slightly and turning toward the west. When it turned, she could see two people inside. One almost looked like a black-haired woman, but Cecilia decided the person must just be a pretty-looking young man.

The plane tipped its wings in salute, then straightened again and headed west into the golden afternoon.

For just a moment, Cecilia watched it receding, wondering where it had been, and where it was going. When it was no bigger than a speck on the horizon, she sighed, then turned again and went back inside.

Dedication

For my grandmothers,
Lila Belle and Lilly Gracia,
brave women

Acknowledgments

Though Keeping the House is entirely a work of fiction, I am grateful for the brilliant work of several historians that gave my imagination a springboard from which to leap, in particular William Manchester’s Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War and Bill D. Ross’s Iwo Jima: Legacy of Valor. A few more that shouldn’t go unmentioned are Calling This Place Home by Joan M. Jensen, Cadet Nurse Stories by Thelma M. Robinson and Paulie M. Perry, Over There by Frank Freidel, Him/Her/Self by Peter G. Filene, and Homeward Bound by Elaine Tyler May. For anyone interested in the real stories of some of the events and places fictionalized in Keeping the House, these are all great reads.