MIFALDA PUT ON her straw hat and began looking for the little hoe she'd left in the back hall. She'd taken to keeping it there since it was now her job to plant and weed the tomatoes. Before the war Carmine would have hired a boy from the neighborhood to do the heavy work for her, but now all the boys were in the army—including Mifalda's sons. Her oldest, Carmine Jr., was in the coast guard, and Nick was stationed in Washington, so she wasn't too worried about them—although Nick could be sent overseas anytime. But Frank was working in a motor pool somewhere in England, which was frightening because of all the bombing over there. And Eddie—her brilliant Eddie, who had gone all the way through medical school on scholarships and become a doctor—was in the air force out in California and was going to be shipped out to some island in the Pacific to be a flight surgeon, but no one knew when or where. That had been keeping Mifalda awake nights already, and then, just when she'd thought things couldn't get any worse, she'd gotten a letter from Eddie.

Mifalda gave up the search for the hoe and took off her hat. Let the tomatoes wait. She went inside to pour herself a glass of lemonade from the refrigerator and sat at the table.

The letter from Eddie had been typical of the madness that was going on all over. He said he'd met a girl—not Italian, but she was Catholic, thank God—and he was going to marry her. No time for a wedding, no time to meet the family; he was going to war and he wanted to get married. And he'd done it. Just like that, Mifalda had a daughter-in-law she'd never met. She sipped the sweet, tart liquid and shook her head. These were crazy times—crazy and bad.

On top of all her other woes, she still hadn't gotten over the shock of losing her husband to a heart attack, even though she'd always known that he would probably go first because he was so much older than she was, rest his soul. And now she had to find someone to run the business. She couldn't do it herself because she was a woman, and Paulie, who was the only boy she had left at home, was only seventeen and planning to join up as soon as he could. She'd finally asked their accountant to take over with the stores, but she knew he was an idiot. So maybe that was why she hadn't been paying as much attention as she should to Lu.