“Number, please.”

She’d made it through an excruciating day at the switchboard.

Excruciating:

1: causing great pain or anguish: agonizing <the nation’s most excruciating dilemma—W. H. Ferry>

2: very intense : extreme <excruciating pain>

And now she stood at the kitchen counter in her white ruffle-edged apron, holding the knife firmly in her right hand and, with her left over the dull side of the blade, crunched evenly through the carrot on the cutting board. With each crunch Vivian remembered the surprised “Oh!”s and “No!”s of Betty Miller’s voice last night over the phone line, as she listened to the story that would ruin her life. Edward had already left for work by the time she got out of bed that morning, but now he was sitting at the kitchen table reading the paper, calm as you please, as the spaghetti sauce bubbled on the stove.

“Anything interesting?” Vivian said over her shoulder, the bite in tone emphasized in the consonants.

“Hmm?” Edward didn’t look up.

“I said, ‘Anything interesting?’ there in the paper tonight?” Vivian enunciated each syllable through her teeth. “Any interesting stories?”

“Unh,” was Edward’s reply.

He finally looked up to see her standing there facing him and staring, supporting her right elbow with her left hand, the large knife waving back and forth like one of those Fourth of July flags they gave you at the parade.

“You going to cut me if I don’t tell you something interesting?” He grinned as he looked at her, then looked back to the paper and took a sip of his beer. “Well, okay, then, they separated those Siamese twins in Chicago.”

“Siamese twins,” Vivian said flatly, then turned and took another carrot from the counter.

“Mmm-hm.”

Crunch, crunch, crunch, crunch.

“Joined at the head, but didn’t look anything alike, according to this. Imagine that.”

Charlotte breezed into the kitchen, took one look at her mother’s rigid posture, the knife crunching through the carrot, measured the tension in the air, and promptly breezed right out again, her scarf-tied ponytail disappearing in a wisp around the corner.

Later, there was silence at the dinner table as Edward, Vivian, and Charlotte swirled strands of sauce-soaked spaghetti in their spoons and deposited the neat coils into their mouths.

“This is really good, Mother.” Charlotte, as usual, tried to ease the tension with a compliment about her mother’s cooking, which was mediocre at best.

“Thank you, Charlotte.” Her voice was terse. “It’s the recipe Mrs. Tomasetti gave me.”

“So, it’s genuine Italian?” Charlotte had taken the first few bites and decided, with some surprise, that she would most definitely be having seconds.

“Mm-hmm.”

“Tomasettis,” Edward mused. “They live in Frogtown? With the rest of the Guineas?”

Vivian pursed her lips into a tight line. Maria Tomasetti worked with Vivian at Bell, and lived in the southeast part of Wooster, along with the rest of the Italian population. Vivian and Edward both called the area Frogtown, and couldn’t have told you why. Just like they used the term “four-flushers” when complaining about the rich people in north Wooster. They said it, but couldn’t have told you where it came from. Did “four-flusher” mean they were so wealthy they all had four toilets in their homes? Did it mean they were so wealthy and wasteful they flushed their toilets four times each time they used the bathroom? The Daltons really didn’t know. What they knew was that the four-flushers were rich, awful, and probably up to no good with all that money they had.