“Chase let Wilma favor him, but the minute her back was turned, after the service, he’d dig some treat out of his pocket for Jinny, and whisper a joke in Harry’s ear, and whatever it was he said always made Harry giggly as a goose. Wilma would turn to scold them, but then Chase would give her the sweetest smile, and he’d put one arm each around Harry and Jinny, and you could just see her melt, like chocolate on low heat. Of course, by this time, Jack would have gone off to flirt with the girls.”

“It sounds like Chase held everything together, then,” Dolly said.

“Perhaps he did,” Mrs. Fryt said. “And perhaps he could have, though it would have been a tall order even for him—dealing with that Wilma! He was only human, after all. Anyway, once Jack dragged him off to the war, Wilma was an utter wreck. You’d see her around town and her eyes were like glass. Not to be vulgar, but some of us thought she’d plain gone out of her mind. Here was a woman who’d never had to do for herself, and all of a sudden she’s storming around town with baskets full of knitting and sewing and cards for the soldiers, practically trailing yarn behind her down the street!”

“Even in church, she never set down her knitting,” Corinne added.

“We had to show her every bit of it, from how to cast on, to how to make a stitch, to how to follow the Red Cross pattern for socks for the soldiers,” Mrs. Fryt said. “And then it was sock after sock after sock! Well, everyone was knitting socks in those days. I remember there were posters up all over town saying, OUR BOYS NEED SOCKS. KNIT YOUR BIT. Wilma took those slogans straight to heart. She knitted even more than the German ladies, who felt they had to prove their loyalty. I don’t know what Wilma was trying to prove.”

“Remember the sewing bees we had?” Corinne said. “Sewing kits for the soldiers? Wilma would be the first one there working, and you’d have to tap her on her shoulder when everyone else had gone, and she’d look up with those glassy eyes. She wouldn’t even realize it was time to go home. And she was such a terrible seamstress! Didn’t we have to redo nearly everything she did, at the beginning?”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Fryt, shaking her head. “And then there was the garden.”

Some of the ladies giggled. “Now, ladies, be nice,” Thelma said, but even she was having trouble holding back a smile.

“Wilma had a garden?” Dolly prodded.