“You’re awful about Grandma Jo,” said Emma. “I think she sounds really cool.”

“Who’s Grandma Jo?” asked Charlie.

“I’ve told you about her,” said Lulu.

“Apparently you haven’t,” said Charlie. “Or I wouldn’t be asking.”

“I can’t believe I haven’t told you about Grandma Jo,” said Lulu. “We hear of no one else. Night and day, winter and summer, year after year after year. We beg on our bended knees, we implore her through gnashing teeth, ‘Mother,’ we say, ‘enough about Grandma Jo.’ But does Mom listen? Noooo.”

“Grandma Jo was my great-grandmother,” said Fee. “She lived to be a hundred, although I never knew her, unfortunately. They say she was quite a personality.”

“She had three sisters,” said Lulu. “There was Margaret, who was a Perfect Gentlewoman. There was Bethie or Betsey, who was an Angel who died young. And there was Amy, who slept with a clothes-peg on her nose to try to change the shape.”

“Did it work?” said Charlie.

“No,” said Sophie firmly. “It just hurt. A lot.”

“I tried an experiment,” said Lulu. “On her. Mom was not amused.”

“Neither was I,” said Sophie. “It really hurt.”

“Amy married a rich man, and Meg married a poor man …” began Lulu.

“But they were both the richest women in America in the wealth that really counted …” continued Sophie.

“… a busy and useful life and a home full of love,” they both finished in chorus.

“There’s nothing wrong with those things,” said Emma. “Not that you two seem interested in either of them.”

“Who did Grandma Jo marry?” asked Charlie.

“A German professor!” snorted Lulu, laughing—the idea had always amused her.

“Kommen Sie hier, mein liebe little dumpling,” said Sophie, “and I vill show Sie how ve do sings back in old Bavaria.”

“They had a school for boys, which went bust in the Depression,” said Lulu.

“L’arned them little varmints to skin a squirr’l right ‘bout as fine as ol’ Ma Jo herself,” added Sophie.

“She wasn’t just some old hillbilly,” said Emma. “She wrote books.”

“So Mom says,” said Lulu. “But conveniently none of them have survived, so we have no way of knowing what sort of books they were.”

“A Hundred Ways to Make Moonshine,” said Sophie. “Spittoons: A User’s Guide.”

“She had a daughter called Cissie,” said Lulu, “who was arrested three times for being a suffragist, who had a daughter called Jojo, who flew planes in the Second World War, who had Mom, whose full name is Josephine again, who had Emma, who’s really called Josephine, too, only I couldn’t pronounce it when I was little so we use her middle name. They’re all the most horrible old bags; it’s a family tradition.”

“You’ll be sorry one day,” said Fee, “when I’m dead and gone and your daughters come to you the way normal, nice daughters do, wanting to hear stories of the family, and you’ll have been so busy making fun that you won’t be able to remember any of them.”