Susan Logsden sat in the front pew of Grantville's rebuilt Presbyterian church, flanked on one side by Grampa Ben and Grandma Gloria and on the other by her half-sister Pam Hardesty and half-brother Cory Joe Lang. She couldn't stop the tears from flowing down her face as she looked at the twin coffins. "First Grampa Fred died and now Tina has drowned," she said in a low voice. "What am I going to do now?"
Grampa Ben put his arm around her and held her tightly. "You've still got us and you've got Pam and Cory Joe. Don't worry, darlin'. We'll be here when you need us."
He looked toward the front of the church. Enoch Wiley would be coming out any minute now to start the service. Susan buried her face in his shoulder and cried. After a few minutes of heartbreaking sobs, an uproar at the back of the church made her look up. The vision that appeared at the doors was appalling.
"Oh, my God," Pam said. "What does she think she's doing?"
Ben Hardesty turned to look and his face paled. "How did this happen?" he asked himself. "What did we do wrong? How could she do this?"
His daughter Velma, Susan, Pam, and Cory Joe's mother, walked down the aisle, tricked out like the "Bride of Satan."
"Where in the world did she find that much black spandex," Pam wondered. "I wouldn't have thought there was any left in Grantville."
"There isn't," Ben said. "Looks to me like Velma cornered the market.""
Susan, heartbroken and bereft, couldn't stop herself. "I'm not going to let her do this. I'm not. I know we're her kids, but I'm not going to let her do this. Grampa, I'm sorry. We can't let her turn Tina and Glenna Sue's funeral into a circus."
"Susan, honey, just stay right here," Ben said. "I'll take care of it."
Ben was an old man, heart sore from his granddaughter's death. But he wasn't going to take this from Velma, not this time. As a girl, she had gotten her way too often and she'd never learned how to take no for an answer. Ben had hoped that losing custody of Susan and Tina would have taught her a lesson, but it hadn't. Working at the 250 Club had made her even worse.
He stood and left the pew, Cory Joe following him. Intercepting Velma who was on her way down the aisle, he grabbed her arm and forced her to turn around and walk back to the door. "Velma, you're not going to do this. I can't believe you'd even try it."
He practically dragged her out the doors of the church, ignoring her protests. Those protests were loud and somewhat profane. "God damn it," Velma screeched. "How can you throw me out of my own daughter's funeral? Tina was my daughter, you know."
"She wasn't some kind of toy, Velma," Ben answered. "She'd gotten herself declared an emancipated minor because of the way you've been acting the last few years. Cory Joe and Pam left home the minute they could. The courts gave Fred custody of Susan. This drowning is not an excuse for you to make a show like this. You look like a whore, you're acting like a whore, and you're not going to make this kind of scene. Just go home, Velma. Go home and don't even try to contact us or the kids again."
She looked at Cory Joe. He moved closer to his grandfather, saying nothing. The two of them turned and went back into the church together.
Velma stood there, seething. "I'll be damned if they get away with this. I'll show the bastards. I'll show them."
Inez Wiley, the minister's wife, came out of the sacristy. With one thin hand, muscular from years of playing piano, she grasped Velma's arm firmly, leading her away from the building.
Susan pushed her supper around her plate, hanging onto Cory Joe's arm with her left hand. "So soon? Already?"
"Tomorrow morning, kid." He swallowed a deviled egg. "Boy, these are good, Aunt Betty."
Susan, huddled between Cory Joe and Pam, an image of sixteen-year-old miserable hostility, glared across the table at her aunt.
"Not as good as Grandma Lily's used to be. I use her recipe, too—but there's just something missing." Betty Wilson looked gratified in spite of her protest.
Snarky, Susan thought. Why did Grandma Gloria have to invite Aunt Betty and Uncle Monroe, anyway? Aunt Betty was always playing "good daughter" to Mom's "bad daughter"—well, "perfect daughter" to Mom's "horrid daughter." And Grandma Gloria always fell for it. Of course, when Grandma invited her, Betty brought something special, that took a lot of time and fussing to make. Like deviled eggs. Just to show how perfect she was. When everyone knew that she really despised Mom. And despised all four of them, because they were Mom's kids. And now Tina was drowned and Aunt Betty was sitting here alive.
Pam scooped the last two eggs from the platter before Cory Joe could reach across the table for them. He gave her a reproachful look.
"Well." She sighed dramatically. "Since there's a war on." She slid her plate to him.
Maybe Aunt Betty was the kind of person who had something inside her that just made her bring those eggs to supper. But did Pam and Cory Joe have to eat them? And like them? And be polite about it all?
"Do you really have to go already, Cory Joe," Susan chimed in again.
"First thing in the morning. Jackson let me come because it was my sister's funeral, but Pam's right, even if she was making a joke. There's a war on. If that mess up at the quarry had happened two weeks ago, I couldn't have come at all. Now, after Ahrensbök, it's mainly a matter of mopping up. But I've still got to get back."
"All the way up to Denmark?"
"Just as far as Magdeburg. I'm Colonel Jackson's liaison to Don Francisco Nasi, now."
"Mike Stearns' spook?" Pam giggled. "My brother the baby spook. Like Laurie Koudsi is a baby lawyer. That's what they call her, now that she's passed her exams. Why Magdeburg? Don't you have to go out and spy on somebody?"
Monroe Wilson, Aunt Betty's husband, frowned. "You shouldn't be talking about this. Intelligence work, I mean. Not even at a family dinner. 'Loose lips sink ships.' I remember that from school. It was a motto in World War II."
Cory Joe shook his head. "Anybody who wants to can find my name on a personnel list. Nasi doesn't go out scrabbling around his spiderweb in person, any more. He sits in the capital and collects reports from other people. Just another bureaucrat. Think of me as a baby bureaucrat, not a baby spook."
Susan put her head on his shoulder. "At least, you're not likely to get shot at. But I wish you could stay home."
"At least, Pam will be staying with you, Susan," Aunt Betty said.
Pam shook her head. "Tina had a right to live in Fred Logsden's house, just like Susan does. He was their grandpa. He left it to them. But if I went over and moved in there with Susan, you know as well as I do that Mom would be down at the probate court the next day saying that I was battening on her and trying to get my hands on my sister's inheritance. No way. I'm staying at my apartment and Cory Joe is bunking on my couch while he's here."
Ben Hardesty nodded slowly.
"Then who is staying with you, Susan?" Aunt Betty asked.
"I'm by myself."
Betty opened her mouth again.
"And I'm not going home with you, in case you were thinking of saying that, Aunt Betty, just so all your church lady friends can tell you how kind it is of you to take in your sister Velma's obnoxious kid." Susan looked around the table defiantly. "I've been at the house by myself ever since the night Tina drowned. I've already been down to Judge Tito and petitioned to become an emancipated minor. I'm as old as Tina was when she did that. Mom isn't going to get her hands on me again."
She sank down between Pam and Cory Joe again. What right did she have to hate Aunt Betty for despising Velma and not having anything to do with her? She despised Velma herself and didn't want anything to do with her.
Maybe she was exactly like Aunt Betty.
And that would be the worst thing in the world.
She lifted her chin. "I'm okay by myself at Grandpa Fred's house. Everybody understands that, right? I'm okay. Don't be trying to mess up Pam's life, Aunt Betty. She's done fine on her own, since she walked out on Mom, and I will, too. Neither one of us needs for you to be trying to push her into taking care of me now that Tina's gone."
Ben Hardesty sighed.
Veda Mae Haggerty was heading for the afternoon shift. If she had to face one more bit of good cheer, she thought that she would chuck everything. Lettie Sebastian had talked her into dropping off snacks for the Methodist Vacation Bible School. There must have been two hundred kids noisily singing
Adam, Adam, can you tell me,
How was life in paradise?
God provided all we needed.
While it lasted, it was nice!
She had been inclined to tell them to stuff it.
Stinking Ring of Fire. Up-time had been nice. Nicer, at least. While it lasted. Work all your life. Go back and take classes in office management after your kids are grown. Get a decent job, even if you do have to commute for forty-five minutes, winter and summer, rain or shine. Expect to retire on Social Security, enough to see you through, if you can just make it to sixty-five.
Flash of lighting and bam! There won't be any Social Security, any more. Go back to work, Veda Mae. You're healthy. No, nobody needs you in an office. You can go out into the fields and harvest chick peas this summer. Or be a CNA again; that's what you did before you took those classes. Go back to what you did before you went to school. The Assisted Living Center needs you. After all, you're only sixty-four years old, here in the middle of the Thirty Years' War. Turn patients, deal with incontinence. Oh, yeaaay, now you get to deal with it without disposable diapers. Hoist them up into their chairs. Let's all pull together and make a brave new world.
Three years later, now, she was sixty-seven, and she was still emptying bedpans.
Gag me. Yep. While the twentieth century lasted, it had been nice. At least by comparison with the seventeenth.
Magnificent seventeenth-century victory. Hah! Gustavus Adolphus triumphant. Congress of Copenhagen. Newspapers all over the "exciting" seventeenth-century betrothal of Princess Kristina to some Danish prince. The kid was what? Seven years old? Younger than a lot of the ones sitting over at the Methodist church, singing. What were the odds that she'd actually marry this fellow some day? Low, probably. Stupid newspapers.
Then her daughter-in-law Laurie had decided that she wanted to go to nursing school. Well, Veda Mae had let Gary know just exactly what she thought of that. What was a mother for, if not to advise her son? Anybody who wanted to go into nursing was a fool; he should put his foot down. So he put his foot down. Laurie divorced him. Now he was a two-time loser, some people said, but it was still better than having Laurie go back to school and get degrees where she would have been so far above him.
She might have been better off herself, when she decided to go back and take that business course, if John had just put his foot down in the beginning, instead of saying that it was okay and then making her life miserable about "uppity women" for the next twenty years. But he'd died just over a year after it happened. She didn't miss him, much. His emphysema had been too bad for him to go back to work and the Ring of Fire had taken away his miner's pension and health benefits, so she'd been stuck supporting him, too.
But that Laurie! Worse than Jennifer, and Jennifer had been bad enough as a daughter-in-law, and then got herself left up-time, so Gary had to take their kids in again. Jennifer was probably living in Fairmont, flirting with rich guests at that motel where she worked. While Marcie was at the school, spending her days teaching English to Kraut kids and Blake was training to be a policeman, working with a Kraut partner. Having the gall to tell their own grandma not to be prejudiced!
But at least she'd told Gary to put his foot down when Laurie wanted to take up nursing. A wife shouldn't get above her husband and Gary was a dropout. Which she wasn't going to let him forget. Even Vivian had gone back and gotten her GED, as dumb as she was. Well, not dumb, maybe, but Viv was never going to set the world on fire, if it was her own mother who said so.
And Glenna, the best of the three kids, with a decent job as a telephone lineman, had been killed by the damned Krauts. They cut her head off. People had tried to tell Veda Mae that they were something else, called Croats, who had raided the town that day, but she knew better. They'd been Krauts when her father fought them back in World War II, and they were still Krauts. Not that Glenna had been perfect either, marrying that Catholic boy. But Veda Mae had put a stop to that—not to the marriage, but she'd managed to raise enough of a ruckus that he stopped going to church and didn't make Glenna have their kids baptized in it, either. She'd heard what went on in those convents! Her grandma had a book—the liveliest book she'd ever read, back when she was twelve. She would never have dreamed. . . .
No way was Veda Mae going to learn Kraut. Not a word of it. She hadn't liked it at all when they started admitting Krauts to the assisted living center. Since they were there, if they wanted something from her, they could speak English.
Well, after she dropped off the snacks at the church, she'd picked up this week's newspaper. The Times, not that Kraut rag, the Free Press. Even so, half the news items were about Krauts. And one about Cameron. Laurie's son. Assigned to the personal staff of Colonel Jackson, up in Magdeburg. At least, they'd demoted him. "General"—now that had been a laugh. She'd known Frank Jackson since the day that he was born. He'd been a sergeant, back in Viet Nam. If he was qualified to be a general, even if just of Grantville, Veda Mae was the Queen of Sheba. Thank God there weren't any Japs in town. Just that one little Vietnamese slant-eyed woman, who General (HA!) Frank Jackson married. And everyone knows she was a whore anyway. Little slant doesn't deserve even a faker like Frank Jackson after all. Couldn't she find some little slant guy of her own? Had to steal one of ours.
And a few Chinks, full of college degrees. And Johnnie F. Haun's little adopted slant from Korea. The town was turning into the pits even before the Ring of Fire happened.
Cameron. Damned little bastard upstart. Literally a bastard upstart. When Gary married Laurie, he'd made noises about adopting the boy. She'd put a stop to that, quick enough. Bad enough that Gary had paid for the kid's food and provided him with a bed for fifteen years, just to have Laurie divorce him once her charming little woods colt was out of high school.
It was enough to make a person sick. She couldn't call in sick for her shift, though. Someone was bound to have seen her dropping those blasted snacks off at the church. Keeping up a good front and all that—people said it was just wonderful, the way that Veda Mae was bearing up since Glenna Sue drowned at the graduation party. Nearly half the kids at that quarry had been Krauts. Who was to say that one of them hadn't had something to do with it. And the police covering it up—they made up more than half the force, now.
If she wasn't a Methodist, she would cuss them all.
John's will had been a slap in the face to her. Leaving a full child's share to Glenna's widower, Ronnie Bawiec, just like the girl was still alive. Veda Mae had gone right down to the Probate Court and filed a challenge to the will. The old coot must have been out of his mind. Oxygen deprivation from the emphysema, or something. Ronnie and Glenna's kids had been left back home; he could just take his share and marry some Kraut, have more children. If Lucille Cochran let that will through probate, she didn't deserve the title of probate judge. Not that she did anyway. She'd been nothing but an assistant clerk in the county probate office before this happened. She was a probate judge like Frank Jackson was a general. Not.
"Hi, Veda Mae."
Ardis Carpenter, blast her hide. Why did Gary have to go into partnership with Duck and Big Dog? Not that Garbage Guys weren't doing well, as a business. All three of them were making more money than they'd ever hoped to see, now that Duck and Big Dog had decided to go straight. Or, probably, sort of wavy, but not as crooked as they'd been before. They still took the chances that came their way, but they didn't go looking for them, any more.
They'd gotten Ardis a house, now. Down-time construction; up-time houses that came on the market were bringing more than they could afford. But compared to the shacks that Ardis had lived in most of the time her kids were growing up, they'd dropped her in the lap of luxury. With a Kraut woman coming in once a week to clean it up. Protecting their investment, probably. They'd kept the title in their own names and just given Ardis the use of the house. If they gave it to her, it would be gone—some smooth talker would con her out of it in no time.
Which would be no more than she deserved, the stupid, feckless, welfare queen, bringing up her kids on the taxes the government squeezed out of people who worked.
She needed coffee. She turned into Cora's. Half-full of Krauts. She backed out again, without ordering. She'd get some from the kitchen at the center. She bumped into Henry Dreeson, who was coming in. Knocked his cane out from under him. Well, she wasn't about to pick it up. Marrying a Kraut woman and still claiming to be the mayor of a decent American town. And now she had taken off on some damn fool errand having to with her first husband and left the old goat to take care of her whorish granddaughter's crew of orphans. Served the old goat right.
Letting them run schools. Bad enough to let them into the Grantville schools, without letting them run their own. Not just Dreeson's wife. There was a whole Kraut school out there, now, just beyond where the highway ended. Using the Kraut language. Teaching un-Americanism, probably. And another one going up on the other side of town.
"Good morning, Mrs. Haggerty."
Another Garbage Guy, a foreigner. Jacques-Pierre, his name was. Not a Kraut, though, so she waved back. He did the route with Gary, sometimes. A Frenchie, but spoke English. He'd spent time in London, growing up, when the Catholics made it hot for his family in France.
Sometimes it seemed that of all the people in Grantville, he was the only one who understood how Veda Mae felt about things. She was happy to be able to answer his questions—make him understand how things really were, these days, here in Grantville. Tell him about how her niece Kimberly was married to Andy Yost who was in bed with those Committees of Correspondence Krauts—Commies for a sure thing. And her cousin Nat making all those machines and things for the Stearns regime—Commies too, all of 'em.
She made it to work on time.
"I've never been so humiliated," Velma Hardesty unwrapped the silverware from the cloth napkin and slammed it down on the table. "In public. Just last week. My own father treated me like I was some kind of tramp. Someone to be ashamed of. At my own daughter's funeral. I'm not going to stand for it. And the kids, too."
Veda Mae Haggerty nodded. "Yes."
"I won't let those little bastards get away with it."
Too good to pass. "Actually," Veda Mae said in a precise voice, "only Pam is a bastard. You were married to Cory Joe's father when you had him. And to Tina and Susan's father, when you had them."
Velma was so focused on her own injustices that she hadn't even been listening, Veda Mae noticed with regret.
"What gave him the right?"
"He didn't have any right, Velma. You're the mother. He's just a grandparent." Not, of course, that a mother necessarily knew better than a grandparent, Veda Mae thought. Take her ex-daughter-in-law Laurie, for example . . .
The waitress took their order before she could even verbalize a complaint, which didn't improve her mood.
Of course, they were at the hotel. The reopened and renamed Willard, right downtown, not Delia Higgins' pretentious new one. Neither of them was any longer welcome at Cora's, where the food was both better and cheaper. However, there were advantages. Willard Carson kept an eye out to see that his old friends were taken care of properly. It wasn't fair, Veda Mae thought, after he'd invested all that money, that Delia Higgins had opened a brand new one and would probably tempt away a lot of the high-end trade. It wasn't as if Delia needed the money. And Ramona married to that Kraut from Badenburg.
She found some mild comfort in thinking that Delia had a daughter who was no more satisfactory than Viv. Though why Ramona should get a rich husband while Viv had to make do with a glorified gardener—no matter what you called teaching ag at the VoTech school, that's what Alden Williams was—and Viv had always behaved herself, while Ramona had that little bastard. . . . God didn't play fair. At least not on Earth.
"I think," Velma was saying solemnly, "that it was Meant. That you should be there to see it. To see how they treated me." She paused for a bite of her lunch. Fish sandwich on rye. Ugh.
"Meant?"
"Yes. By the Stars. You are Veda and I am Velma. Although you were born with a different surname, you were Guided to marry John Haggerty. So now you are Haggerty and I am Hardesty. It was the intent of Fate that our Paths Should Come Together. It's very Symbolic that you were at the funeral, too."
Veda Mae was not so sure about that. Symbolic, that was.
She'd been at the funeral because the other girl who died in the swimming accident at the quarry was her own granddaughter, which appeared to have slipped Velma's mind. Velma Hardesty was a trashy piece of work—always had been and probably always would be. Presbyterians weren't supposed to rattle on about things that were Meant by the Stars. That was astrology. Superstition. Not that Velma was in good standing at the Presbyterian church. Unlike Veda Mae, who was quite conscientious about being Methodist, although she sometimes doubted that the Reverends Jones appreciated that. Reverends—Mary Ellen, female minister. Veda Mae only took communion when the Reverend Simon had the service.
But Velma was right about one thing—it had been nasty of Ben to toss her out of her own daughter's funeral. No matter what else you could say about what Velma had been wearing, at least, spandex and all, at least it had been black. A lot of people didn't even bother to wear black to funerals, these days. Why right in her own family, for Glenna Sue's funeral, Laurie herself—Glenna Sue's own mother—hadn't bothered to wear black. Just a plain navy blue dress. Marcie had worn a white blouse and a tan skirt—and when Veda had told her that it wasn't suitable, said, "Put it aside, Grannie. Just for one day. Save it for another day. Just once." Then she had changed places, to the other side of Gary.
When Gary had come to pick her up, he had been wearing a tie, but no jacket. She had made him put on one of John's old sport coats. It didn't fit him very well, but respect for the dead was respect for the dead.
She had worn black to Glenna Sue's funeral. She had worn that dress to every funeral she had attended for the past twenty-five years. She kept it in a plastic zipper bag from the cleaner's, just for that. You needed to pay your due respects to the dead. No matter what you had thought of them when they were alive. Like Glenna Sue dancing with those pansies in Bitty Matowski's ballet. And Laurie encouraging it.
She started to say, "And I told Ben Hardesty . . ." but Velma interrupted.
Not that Velma was wearing black this morning. Veda Mae thought that the other woman was getting a bit long in the tooth for bare-midriff styles; she'd definitely been letting herself go the last couple of years. The belly was distinctly pudgy, and there were love handles hanging over the low-slung Capri pants. Velma was waving one hand and proclaiming, "There has to be something that I can do about it." She ran her hand through her hennaed hair.
Veda Mae remembered that the hair had been bleached blond before the Ring of Fire. She also remembered Velma's first experiment with a down-time bleach concoction after the Grantville salons ran out of supplies. It had made Velma's hair so brittle that the first time she put her curling iron to it afterwards, a lot of it broke off, all uneven. Veda Mae had seen the results. She smiled briefly at the recollection. Then, somewhere, Ken Beasley's wife Kim had gotten a supply of henna. Veda Mae hadn't wanted Kim to use Kraut stuff on her hair, but she didn't want gray hair, either. Kim said that it came from Venice. Veda Mae couldn't see that Eyetalian goop was much better than Kraut goop, but she'd let Kim use it. She sneaked a glance in the mirror. It looked pretty good. Actually, it looked better on her than it did on Velma; the reddish color clashed pretty bad with Velma's complexion.
Velma had kept right on talking. ". . . and the judge, and the juvenile officer, and all of them," she wound up.
Veda Mae leaned forward. "It's a conspiracy. Listen, Velma. I know this guy, Jacques-Pierre Dumais. He works with Gary. He's a foreigner, but he understands what we're all being put through by Mike Stearns and his cronies. I know that Stearns is your cousin, but if some of the other UMWA men like my husband John had taken a stronger stand when all this started, they could have kept him from taking over. The way he makes up to the Krauts is disgusting. It really is. Putting Grantville under this Kraut, first as Captain-General and now as Emperor. As if anyone thinks this USE will last. Talk about jerry-built. People must have been crazy to adopt that sick excuse for a constitution."
Velma answered, a little doubtfully, "I think the emperor is a Swede. I saw that on TV. And Mike hasn't done anything to me. He and Becky invited me to their wedding. It's Dad. And the Logsdens. And those ungrateful kids of mine. Otherwise, you know, it could all have been Meant."
Veda Mae felt vaguely betrayed that Velma didn't share all of her own grudges. But what could you expect? A lot of the time, she was probably too drunk to notice what was going on. Or in bed with some man. If not with two, if a person could believe some of the stories that went around. Which a person probably could. According to Joyce Burke, she'd actually had a boob job, up-time, before the Ring of Fire. Wonder who paid for that? Probably some guy who got to play with the boobs!
At least Velma didn't sleep around with the Krauts, not like some people Veda Mae could name. Naida Carpenter, for one. Ardis's daughter. She was married to one, and Big Dog and Duck hadn't done a thing about it. Well, Ardis's other girl had been living with one of them until she and the kids burned to death in April. The gossip columnist in the paper, the one who went by "Roger Rude," had hinted that it was arson and the Kraut had done it. Veda Mae wouldn't be surprised. Served Mandy Sue right. And her kids were probably better off dead. Veda Mae had gone to the funeral, though, wearing black, since after all it was the sister of Gary's partners being buried.
But Jacques-Pierre had said that it was her religious duty to offer Spiritual Comfort to Velma—that she should talk more about the things that were bothering Velma. Not so much about the things that were bothering herself. She listened patiently as Velma returned to her favorite subject: Velma. And the injustices that Velma suffered. And how misunderstood Velma was. And how very, very much Velma resented the fact that her daughter Susan was ungratefully depriving her of a decent standard of living, which she could easily provide with all that money she had made on those investments through the Barbie Consortium.
Veda Mae listened for quite a while, throwing in comments, occasionally, about Delia Higgins' Kraut son-in-law, Kraut lawyers who drew up miserly financial contracts when you rented out your upstairs rooms, and Mike Stearns' Kraut wife.
Velma frowned. "Becky is Jewish. I think. I'm sure. I went to the wedding."
"Becky," said Veda Mae, "has to be a Kraut. No matter what she claims to be. Mike met her right here in Krautland, didn't he? She talks the language, doesn't she?"
Velma looked vaguely puzzled, but it wasn't something that was really worth arguing about. She went back to talking about Velma. And money. And Velma.
When it came to money, at least, Veda and Velma were in harmony. Someone had done them out of their rightful share of something. They had a lovely chat about corruption in the Grantville court system. Finally Veda Mae said, "You ought to meet Jacques-Pierre. He can tell you how it all connects together. He understands the problems that we're having. He really does."
As she finished up her carrots, she cast around for some words that Velma would understand. "He can offer you Spiritual Comfort. It was probably Meant that he's come here to Grantville."
Jacques-Pierre Dumais flinched inwardly at the company he was keeping. However, Madame Haggerty had a grandson—well, a step-grandson, to be precise—on Jackson's staff. Madame Hardesty, to whom she had just introduced him, had a son on the personal staff of Colonel Jackson, assigned to the office of Don Francisco Nasi. The two young men were said to be friends.
In this summer of 1634, discontent among the up-timers might be the best advantage France had. Possibly even the only one. Mesdames Hardesty and Haggerty were not pleasant company, but people had survived worse.
Reminding himself of the tribulations undergone by Job, he smiled and shook hands.
Sunday dinner at Grandpa Ben's. Which would have been okay, Susan thought, if only Aunt Betty wasn't here again.
"Mom's collected herself some new guy," Susan said a little sulkily. "Younger, with good abs. I saw them on the street outside the Willard just yesterday. Talking to Glenna Sue's grandmother."
Ben frowned. "Susan, you shouldn't . . ."
". . .'speak about my mother like that.' I know the rigamarole."
"Susan, please," Pam said.
"Who is he?" Grandma Gloria asked.
"Don't know. Never saw him before."
Betty Wilson drew in a breath, reminding herself that sometimes it was harder than others to put the best construction on everything. Especially when it came to the activities of her sister Velma.
"Then you don't know that he is one of Velma's 'guys,' Susan."
Betty bowed her head briefly. Most of the time it was impossible for her to put the best construction on Velma's activities, no matter what the Bible and the Book of Mormon admonished her to do. Well, all of the time. Nevertheless, at a minimum, she could make herself act like she put the best construction on everything. The least she could do for Velma's girls was to be a good role model. Heaven only knew, they needed one. So.
"You don't even know who he is. You just said so yourself. And if you can't say something nice about a person, don't say anything at all."
Susan and Pam just looked at one another. Aunt Betty was being very Aunt Betty-ish. Again.
"Why don't you just say what you think? You know that you're thinking the same thing we are."
"You can't know what I'm thinking."
"I sure can. Even when you're acting all pious and righteous, and don't pretend that's not what you're doing." Susan looked at the others. "Mom's up to something again, and we're all going to end up being sorry we know her. Again."
She looked at Pam. "I don't know about you, but I am so sick and tired of being Velma Hardesty's daughter that I could spit."