“That looks good,” Isabelle confirmed, pleased that Nurse Tucker hadn’t assumed she couldn’t read.

“And what about your daughter?”

“I’ve always liked the name Flora,” Isabelle said with a dreamy look in her eyes. “You know, Flora is the Roman goddess of flowers and spring.”

Nurse Tucker’s mouth slowly came out with, “That’s very pretty,” after a prolonged pause, but her face said, Well, look at you!

Isabelle was used to people underestimating her.

“It’s not their fault,” she’d later explain to her children. “They’re just ignorant. They need to learn.”

Flora would have liked to have had a private memorial service for Gilbert and her mother, in the living room of the Toronto bay-and-gable Victorian she, Bill, and Gilbert had called home for a little while, but there wasn’t time. As soon as she and Bill had heard about the shooting, they knew their neighbors would soon, too. They had to get out of there quickly. It took them a half hour to pack up their clothes and Bill threw some books and board games into a box on top of the suitcase that held their money. Flora took special care with the mink Gilbert had given her, holding her handkerchief to her eyes so the tears wouldn’t drop onto the coat.

There was still the odd day in late spring where she’d pull the mink around her as she sat in front of the fire in their new cozy little house, roughly one-third the size of the bay-and-gable Victorian, and the perfect size for the two of them. Flora was helping Bill with his French, because if they wanted to be cast in the local theater productions, they’d need to be able to understand their lines. She was also trying to think of the best time to tell him she wanted to send the rest of the money back to the Wayne Building & Loan. She wanted to be rid of it. Rid of the memories it brought and rid of the way it still tied her to J. Ellis Reed.

Flora was happy where she was now, and when she was ready, she’d tell you the name of the town. For the time being, Flora would just say it was “somewhere small.” Somewhere just like Wooster.

Author’s Note

The recipes and poems in this book are my grandmother’s (typos and all—don’t blame the copyeditors), and the newspaper articles are verbatim from The Daily Record, just with name changes and an extra detail in one (the “youngster”). I’ve exercised some artistic license in other historical details of this book, and wanted to acknowledge them. The story is loosely based on my grandmother, but “loosely” is crucial to keep in mind. The portrayal of Vivian McGinty’s parents is pretty close to the truth; however, the portrayal of her siblings is fictional, and their characters do not resemble my grandmother’s own family (other than the fact that her youngest sister, my Great-Aunt Ginny, really did thwart the armed robbery at the William Annat Company department store). The Myth of Sisyphus was not translated from French into English until 1955, so Charlotte would not have read it in her 1952 English class. Wooster’s A&W was not established until 1957, so Clyde Walsh would have had to take Ginny Frazier somewhere else for their first date. The A&W also, apparently, never served burgers, just hot dogs and chicken sandwiches, in their early years. The Heidelberg Chocolate Factory is not a real place, at least in Wooster. Quinby Elementary School, Forest Chapel Methodist Church, and Wayne Building & Loan were also created for the story. Alphanumeric telephone exchanges were really only used in the larger cities, but I liked the way “MAson-8812” sounded, better than “32” or something similar. Some of the telephone numbers for Wooster in the early 1930s were just two digits. The switchboard operators sat in non-wheeled chairs (based on photographs), which was far more practical, but I wanted the chairs to have wheels. Just because. I tried to keep everything else as authentic as possible but, not having lived during that time, I’m sure there will be discrepancies. My apologies in advance.