“Well, wouldn’t that be a fine how-do-you-do?” Vivian overheard Ruth Craven saying to Dorothy as she entered the room. She might’ve been talking about Vivian, but she might not.

“I don’t know why she’s staying with him,” Vivian later overheard Dorothy whispering to Rose Troyer, one of the new girls. Dorothy was most definitely talking about her.

“Her poor daughter!” Vivian overheard Laura cooing to Ruth, in her gooey baby voice, as they came back from their cigarette break.

You know who wasn’t acting like Vivian was about to wipe her headset all over their skin with her full-blown case of the marital plague? Maria Tomasetti. Now, how do you like that?

“Vivian, how are you doing?” Maria asked during a late afternoon lull at the switchboard.

“Oh, fine, thanks.” Vivian kept her tone breezy and forced a Fire & Ice smile.

“Really? Because, if you need to talk about anything, I’m here.”

Vivian kept her eyes on the switchboard, hoping for a blinking light.

“Well, thank you.”

“Men are stupid, Vivian.”

Vivian felt a tiny spasm of release in her chest cavity, and her forced smile relaxed into a genuine one. She sighed a little before a light blinked in front of her. She nodded gratefully to Maria, and noted to herself that Maria’s English was really improving. Vivian plugged the rear key cord into the board.

“Number, please.”

On her way home from work Vivian thought about the calls she’d listened to. The only one she’d recognized had been the mayor calling Don McAfee, Vivian’s private investigator. That’s how she thought of him now, as her own private investigator. She’d had to bite her tongue to keep from saying, “Hello, there!” over the line she wasn’t supposed to be listening to. The call hadn’t been terribly interesting, just the mayor telling Don to “keep working on our project,” like he’d been doing. Vivian assumed the “project” was looking for Gilbert Ogden and Flora Parker. She wondered if they were even still alive, and if they were, what they’d been up to since they’d absconded, and how much of that money they had left. Then her thoughts flashed briefly to the hatbox in her closet.

She passed Freedlander’s, like she always did, and looked in the window of the toy department, as she sometimes did. They’d changed the display from the miniature kitchen set, with a stove, refrigerator, and doll wearing a red gingham apron and holding a tray of plastic cookies, to a realistic model train set, with an impressive black steam engine, passenger cars, and cargo cars, and a caboose with a tiny die-cast engineer holding a striped cap. She stopped and stared at the train set and the tiny engineer through the glass, and felt a sharp fork of pain in her stomach. Trains always made her think of Pawpy.

Was it worse, what her father had done to her mother? Those letters to those other women? Was that worse than what Edward had done to her? Because not telling Vivian about his first wife was the same as lying to her about it. YES IT WAS!