Since their mother’s mind had begun to go, and she’d started to lash out at Flora for having married a white man, Gilbert had assumed all the communication with her. Gilbert was the only real family either Flora or their mother had left.

“Honey, if it was my mother,” Bill said, stroking the top of her head, “I’d do the same. I can’t stop him.”

Well, she should have considered who she was asking for support, Flora thought with a mixture of exasperation and affection. Bill Parker had always been a mama’s boy. It wasn’t the worst quality in a husband, having an appreciation for his mother, but it wasn’t her favorite thing about him. He had his strengths, though.

Bill’s capacity for drama surpassed her own. If Madame Ososki could have seen them, she would have been surprised that the two naïve rubes from “Nebraska” had learned something from her. That they had paid attention in class, and worked hard to instill her lessons into the deepest depths of their very beings. And then she would have been proud, although she would have insisted that Bill “use your words!” to convey his rage. She would have been wrong. He had done beautifully without them.

Could there have been a better training ground for them than New York City theater? Although they’d both moved to Wooster half certain they’d never act again, the small town eventually became their stage, where both finally had the opportunity to give performances of a lifetime. Flora as a mild-mannered, double-crossing bank secretary. And Bill as a scorned and outraged cuckold of a husband.

Flora would have disagreed with Vivian Dalton’s assertion that everyone knew everyone else’s business in a small town. She and Bill had kept to themselves, for the most part, and no one had any idea what they had been up to. Sure, the neighbors could get curious about where they were going, or what they were doing for the holidays, or she might have caught some nosy housewife inspecting her shopping cart at Buehler’s, passing judgment on her groceries, but overall the Parkers had been able to live a nice, quiet, and private life there in Wooster, Ohio.

As they had done in New York, they rehearsed together in the evenings, after coming home from work. Bill had obsessed over his performance, spending hours asking himself, What is my motivation? and trying to come up with the perfect props to guarantee believability. Should he take the hat? Or would he have been too insane with anger and jealousy to remember the hat? Same question with the coat, although it was June. Maybe he should take a coat, just to prove how out of his mind he was. His winter coat would have hinted at serious derangement. A winter coat, in June? Why, that Bill Parker must be positively out of his mind, and who could blame him? Wife robbing a bank and running off with another man.

He had hemmed and hawed over the ideal time of day to stage his dramatic exit from their cozy little house. He didn’t want to do it in the middle of the night, when no one would be watching; likewise, the middle of the day, when his neighbors would have been at work or running errands. Except, Flora had reminded him, she and Gilbert would be leaving on a Friday, and if everything went perfectly, no one would realize what they’d done until the following Monday. They’d had to concoct a story as to why Flora wouldn’t have come home from work that Friday. Bill had told their neighbors that Flora had told him she was going out of town to visit her mother. “Glad to be staying here, if you know what I mean,” he had said, chuckling, to Sam Goosson next door. Sam had guffawed and clapped Bill on the back. “I know what you mean!” Mothers-in-law and whatnot.