Everything Tootie did had to be just so. She did good in school because of this. She was the valedictorian of the high-school class. She went off to college and studied to be a doctor. One time she came home for Christmas and told me the men in college was after her and she didn’t want any fool man. This is because she was her daddy’s girl and no man in the world could be like her Pa for her. Pa was far from perfect but he was Tootie’s pal, and whenever you told her how Pa kicked Ma down the stairs and pulled out his .32, Tootie would walk away or she would defend Pa. Once she hit Ida in the face over a quarrel about Pa and broke her nose. Tootie could hit like a man. It was a curse that she was so beautiful, and at medical school she got fat to cover it up. She went into a fat period. Tootie was the first woman doctor in all of town. Ma helped—it was the German way to get education and better yourself in life. Tootie won scholarships and went to the University of Chicago, which is where all of them intellectuals went. She inherited Ma’s spunk and wasn’t afraid of nothing.

Ma sent me to secretary school, but I was running with Chunky then and quit after three months. Ida married Harry and he was good to her, although he liked to run with women and cheat. Harry got rich and moved them to De Kalb, and we didn’t see that much of them after that. Moonie married Tom when she was eighteen; then after the war he left her for some floozy and she had a nervous breakdown and we had to look after her and the baby until she got over it and married Wilson.

Mary Lou, the second oldest and the one most like Tootie, got married to Monk and moved to Oswego. Ma ran the store on her own except there were always grandkids to take the clinkers out of the furnace and shovel coal, stock the shelves, and do all of the heavy work, and we girls was never far away. Moonie never did much to help in the store. She was the opposite of Tootie. She was crazy for men. Happy-go-lucky whenever one came around.