Boyd Hunsicker was the kind of man Flora had spent much of her life trying to avoid. Overbearing, overweight, and overly confident, with a blustering manner of speaking, he punctuated his words with jabs to the air from an unlit cigar, because his doctor told him he shouldn’t smoke. Flora winced as his inflated waistline brushed against the back of her chair, and wondered if there was anything else his doctor had told him he shouldn’t do.

In the beginning, he simply used to watch her with an uncomfortable familiarity. His eyes traveled over the features of her face and the contours of her body, as if he were memorizing them. Flora broke a great many pencils out of burgeoning fear and anger, and tried to ward off the violated feeling that his prolonged and inappropriate stares provoked in her.

Over time Mr. Hunsicker grew bolder, feeling more secure in his position of power over her. “That husband of yours, Phil, what’s he do?” he had said. “Bill,” Flora would answer in a measured, patient tone, “his name is Bill.” She was sure Mr. Hunsicker knew that her husband’s name was Bill, and that what Bill “did” was split his time making deliveries for Barrett’s Flower Shop and apprenticing as an electrician at Rambo & Long.

Mr. Hunsicker knew that her husband (Bill) didn’t make enough money to support them, and knew that she needed to keep her job at the Building & Loan. Women with few options were always the best targets. In the privacy of his office, when she was taking dictation for him, he would recite a few lines regarding bank business, but then interject that her skirt that day “really got him going,” and then almost in the same breath ask her, “How’s Phil doing?” After a while she’d stopped correcting him, and let him call her husband by the wrong name. He seemed to enjoy it.

He took a grotesque interest in her marriage, which was almost as troubling as his interest in her body. It was all she could do to keep from gagging when he touched her. A fat swollen hand on her elbow, an intentional brush of his arm against her backside as she was leaving the office. He stank of whiskey and charbroiled steak, regardless of the time of day. But it was all for the greater good, and their future, and she stifled her revulsion and played her part admirably. She never rebuffed him directly, and twisted her suppressed gags into flirtatious giggles, making it seem like he was moving in the right direction, and that it would only be a matter of time. Stanwyck’s Phyllis Dietrichson had nothing on Flora Parker.

Gilbert Ogden had a sixth sense for Flora’s internal distress, and always made it a point to visit her desk after she had been in Hunsicker’s office with the door closed. In the slightest of movements, unnoticed by anyone else, he would place a reassuring hand over hers as it rested on the desktop, and then smooth his suspenders, straighten his bow tie, and return to his seat behind the counter, where he’d chew on his fingernails, because he was nervous, too. Flora loved him for his efforts to comfort her, but she would still rush home and scrub her body raw in a hot shower to try to remove any and all lingering traces of Boyd Hunsicker.