The Sky Club

PART ONE

SPRING

1929

1

YOU COULD SAY THAT MY life began with my mother’s death.

For up until that time, I was slated to become one kind of woman, and after that, everything changed. Everything changed and I became another.

She passed in the first few days of February 1929, which was harsh and cold in the Big Pine Valley. Not an especially bitter winter as mountain winters go, but even so, it was long and dark, as mean a season as you can imagine. The rhododendron leaves curled tight for days and lambs born overnight froze to death in the pasture grass before dawn.

My mother’s name was Mary Freeman Salter. She was fifty-eight when she died of measles. Of all the things in this solid world to die of … measles. The doctor, when we were finally able to get him up the icy dirt roads to home, said the measles caused her brain to swell and led into pneumonia. In the end, she couldn’t breathe, the doctor said, and so she suffocated.

But you should know this, here at the beginning. None of those things killed my mother. Exhaustion is what killed her. Fifty-eight years of farm work—from before first light to after dark. Oh, my father worked, make no mistake, but she was up an hour before him to stoke the cookstove and boil the coffee; and she was darning and knitting for an hour after he was snoring by the fireplace. Fifty-eight years of that plus seven children born at home—my brothers and me.

In the last few days of January, when her head had begun to hurt her terribly but she still had breath, she called me in from the kitchen to sit with her. It was a bleak afternoon, and the whole house stank of wood smoke and grease from having been shut up since Thanksgiving. We were the only ones there as Papa had the boys in the woods felling trees to cut into railroad ties.

She stroked my hand and told me two large things. Don’t feel sorry for me, was the first. Don’t you ever feel sorry for me. I chose this life, and I loved this place. Loved your father often as not. Bottom line, I chose this right here, and I was up to the task, both the daytime of it and the night.

She paused and coughed. Not an outright coughing fit. That came later. But a hoarse rattle in her lungs that she couldn’t clear. I chose it and it’s my life … But it is not your life. This was the second thing.

What do you mean? I asked. She startled me, and I asked it loud enough to be heard in the yard.

I mean when this is finished, she murmured. When I’m dead and buried … you get the hell out of here. Make a life for … Her voice was shriveling up, and I leaned over her, for at that point she was no longer contagious. My chest against her chest, my ear close by her lips to hear the rest. Make a life somewhere else … a life that I can’t even imagine.

She made me promise her. Which I was glad to do. For it was a relief to be shut of my father and the two brothers still at home. All of whom I loved, of course, but all those men require a lot. Plus there’s this: when my mother died at fifty-eight, she looked seventy at least. Her dear old face was wrinkled like a dried apple and her hair a dirty white.

We buried her in her best dress at Crooked Ridge Cemetery with fresh snow falling around us. My father did not cry or weep but neither did he speak. Stood trembling with his jaw clenched shut like a sprung trap.

The preacher talked about how we’d better get right with Jesus if we ever expected to see her in heaven. And how she’d climb up out of that grave on some last day, along with the rest of the saints. Something else about a trumpet blast. But for once, he didn’t talk overlong because it was so damn cold. The boys—my brothers—had dug the grave out of frozen, rocky soil with pick and shovel, and when the preacher said amen, they filled it in again. They—all six of them—too sad and cold to even cuss the ground.

And so, at the ripe age of twenty-six, an old maid by country count, I came to live in the big, bold town of Asheville, North Carolina. Came to live by mutual agreement in Uncle Frank and Aunt Brenda Morgan’s house on Charlotte Street. Twenty-six years old, I was to look for a job and pay a percentage for room and board. I was old but not a maid. I’d taken care of that little piece of business when I was fifteen.

2

YOU’VE GOT A BOY’S BODY."

Well, the … with you …

Don’t take it wrong. I have a body like a cow. Bo-vine. I could smoke two packs a day and starve myself silly and I still wouldn’t be as skinny as you.

My cousin, Sissy Morgan, was watching me unpack the trunk that contained just about all my worldly possessions, a half-dozen books and a few things to hang in the closet.

I gave her the same critical once-over she was obviously giving me. I’ve had to do with a lot of cows in my time and I don’t think …

Humpf. That was the sound she made. Easy for you to say. You didn’t get stuck with these mammaries like I did. She was sitting on what was to be my bed and leaned back against the headboard to heft her own breasts.

Seen bigger, I said. Men seem to …

Not here, she said. Maybe up there in the holler where you come from. But it’s 1929 down here, and men expect you to look lithe and lissome.

What?

You know. Lean, muscular. Like you could dance all night with a cigarette in one hand and a gin in the other.

Preacher says you’ll go to hell tomorrow for dancing.

Well then, we’re going there, she said. You and me.

I grinned at her. Could be we will. But I have a feeling I’ve got a lot to learn first about … 1929.

A hell of a lot, she agreed. God, Josephine, are those really your clothes?

I was half in the closet, slipping one of my three dresses onto a wire hanger. My best dress, really, at least what I’d worn to church on special Sundays up home. I had to bite my lip before I replied to Sissy, for I’d grown up around all those brothers, and I had a salty tongue. Didn’t want to make an enemy on the first day and the dress itself was almost ten years old, a velvet number that was worn paper thin in places.

When I did turn around, Sissy was going through the clothes left in the trunk, carefully laying one dress or skirt or blouse out on the bed after another. I said, are these really your clothes? she repeated herself.

I heard you, I said carefully. Some of it’s mine. Mostly my mother’s.

She looked up suddenly. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean …

I shook my head at her, more roughly than I intended. For I could feel my face crumpling up, and tears. A real, honest-to-God, ugly crying fit.

And you need to understand. I don’t cry. Not since I was sixteen or seventeen and my mother had told me to get over myself. Oh, occasionally when it was that time of the month, I’d get a little weepy out of pure self-pity. But not like this. Not the flood out of the Bible.

Sissy stood up and put her chubby arms around me. Josephine, honey, I’m sorry. Truly, I am. I just meant … And then she started to cry. Nearly as old as me, a grown woman, and her cranking up just because I was. All I meant was that there’s no color, nothing … soft.

She was right. The clothes on the bed were black and brown and gray. They looked harsh almost. Weathered to the color of an old barn that has never been painted. Well, she had a blue chiffon, I offered, trying not to sound defensive.

Where is that? She was standing beside me, her arm around my shoulder still. It was comforting, I admit.

We b-b-buried her in it, I blubbered, and we were off again, crying on each other’s shoulders. Had my mother actually been there, she would have told us both to dry up and wash our faces.

According to Sissy, my underclothes were the worst. In her words, an absolute horror. I came to town with my three or four pairs of cotton step-ins and two items that I suppose you could name brassieres, one to wash and one to wear. And three slips, one of which, a cream-colored number, I was actually quite proud of.

Sissy could abide the slip, she said, and she laughed out loud at the brassiere I wasn’t wearing. "This thing wouldn’t hold one of mine, she exclaimed. But even so, I can’t imagine a man would want to touch it, let alone …"

What! It never crossed my mind that a man would …

She stared at me for a long moment. Okay, Josephine … No, not Josephine for God’s sake. What did they call you at home?

Josie.

She shook her head decisively. Nope. Sounds like a cow.

The woman was obsessed with cows and had probably never milked one.

Not Josie … Jo, she said. And apparently liked the sound of it.

Listen to Sissy, Jo. This is your first lesson from the twentieth century, where you have come to live. The whole point of what you wear under your dresses and skirts and such is whether or not a glamorous young man of your acquaintance would want to, first, touch that garment, and second, remove it from your body. Understand?

I don’t think … I mean … Jesus … did you actually say glamorous with regards to a man?

She nodded emphatically. "Well, glamorous might be a slight exaggeration. But at least he’s wearing the right clothes and his shoes are shined so that they reflect the moonlight when he’s walking you home from a date."

I was trying to imagine a pair of shoes, men’s shoes no less, that would reflect anything at all. And even if they did, why moonlight?

And the point of your undergarments is that they are both an enticement and a reward to such a young man.

I laughed outright. Most of the young men I had known … well, you wouldn’t want their hands anywhere near you unless you liked the smell of manure and black dirt. You talk like a magazine, I said to Sissy.

Thank you. I read a lot. And I am here to be your teacher. I know clothes the way a bookie knows horses. And what I don’t know about men you could pour in a … a thimble.

What’s a bookie? I asked, mesmerized.

Never mind. Concentrate on the clothes and the men. Tomorrow, we are going shopping. Daddy says that you can start out working at the bank if you want. But not dressed in anything on this bed, not if I have anything to say about it.

Thank you. It was all I could think of to say.

She grinned. We’re going to be friends. Real friends.

And actually, despite all odds, it turns out she was right. I could feel myself smiling back at her.

I’ve told you what I know. Clothes and men. I also know a little bit about liquor. I know which brand of cigarettes to smoke. And I’m very good at my job. She was a stenographer at a real estate development company, whatever a stenographer was. Now, you tell me what you know. What are you good at?

I thought of a dozen kinds of farm work. Hard work in the sun or over a smoking hot stove. None of it made sense there, in the big house on Charlotte Street. I’m very good at numbers, is what I finally said.

3

THE BON MARCHE DEPARTMENT STORE wasn’t as big as a town all by itself, but when Sissy hustled me under that red awning and through the front door the next morning, it felt like it. Four stories high and at least half a city block. Five or six years old according to Sissy, for whom even small numbers were always a little fuzzy.

I had fifty dollars folded small in a change purse and stashed in my mother’s old brown pocketbook. It was half the money my father had given me to start out this new life, and I had no intention of seeing it lost or stolen. Sissy also had money—no telling how much, I doubt she knew herself—that she meant to invest in me.

She’d announced at breakfast that Monday morning that we intended to shop, and shop we did. It was exhausting. In Bon Marche alone, there were six clerks on the first floor, all dressed like they were going to church, and more clothes than I had ever seen in one place in my life. Six clerks, two cash registers, seven life-sized dummies dressed up in women’s clothes, and a fancy woman with a dog who was wearing gloves. The woman, not the dog.

Things I learned that day: The smiling man dressed in a beautiful suit, who stood by the front door and spoke to Sissy when we came in, was a Jewish gent named Lipinsky, and he owned the place. The whole place, all four floors. The dummies were not dummies, they were mannequins. And the dog was not a dog but a poodle.

Does it hunt? I whispered to Sissy, who only gave me a disparaging look and shook her head sadly. I’m sure I would have been on the receiving end of one of her lectures about the poodle dog, but she was too busy. I was too busy.

I took off and put on my clothes more times in that one day than I had in the previous week, and in between, tried on so many different items—alone and in combination—that I lost count. And in case you haven’t figured this out by now, I rarely lose count … of anything.

The final tally? Two panties (by lunchtime, I was calling them that too), two bras, two slips and one half-slip, three pairs of stockings, two skirts, three blouses, and the dress. The dress, chosen from the finalists by Sissy and a young salesgirl named Frances.

I paid for half this haul. Sissy paid for half and a taxicab to ferry us and the bags back to Charlotte Street.

Now, about the dress. I didn’t realize it at the time, but the dress was important. The skirts and the blouses came in real colors. Blue and pink and dark red, except that Sissy and Frances named them turquoise, salmon, and blood. They were to wear to the bank, according to Sissy. But the dress was different. It wasn’t colorful but rather black and silver, and it had a quality the other things didn’t. Even I, as stupid as I was then, realized when I tried it on that it flowed over you like water. It was tight enough to show off your body rather than hide it, but the fabric didn’t bind you anywhere. That dress moved all on its own with you inside it. Sissy gasped and muttered a curse word when she saw it on, and Frances just nodded.

It was not to wear during the day, Sissy explained. It was for nighttime.

Why would you wear something dark as night during the night? I asked her.

She smiled mysteriously. Oh, you’ll find out, was all she said.

I also need to describe my uncle to you at this point. Before what happened later. He was a banker, not the president, but one of the vice presidents to that exalted personage, at the Central Bank and Trust Company downtown on Pack Square. He had been a big man around town for years, and it was somewhat remarkable that my Aunt Brenda, my mother’s sister, had somehow managed to snag him years before when they were both students at Weaver College.

He was always ambitious, a man on the make, and yet, by the time I came to town in February of ’29, he was firmly established and looked it. He had once been tall and thin—like a heron bird—but by that winter, he was portly. In country terms, he was fat, but I came to think of him as portly because his expanse was the evidence of his prosperity.

At home in the evenings, he could be found in his shirt sleeves, but he never left the house unless he was immaculately dressed in trousers, vest, and jacket. Wool in the winter, linen in the summer. At the bank, when he was working on the third floor where no customers could see him, he occasionally took off the jacket, but I never saw him roll up his sleeves or loosen his tie. It was the style that they all aspired to, my Uncle Frank and the men of his circle. Bankers and lawyers and … as I came to see in time, the politicians they consorted with.

They ate well, they drank well, and they dressed well. And as the years passed, it took ever more linen and wool to cover their growing bellies.

In addition to Uncle Frank and Aunt Brenda taking on the appearance of wealth, it was also necessary that the household put on a show as well.

Aunt Brenda was not allowed to cook or serve. There was a colored woman named Pansy for that. She wasn’t allowed to be seen working in the yard. There was Pansy’s husband, Raymond, for that. Apparently when she first came to town, Brenda had happily kept a cow out back, but Frank had nixed that idea after taking a job at the bank. Milk was to arrive each weekday morning on a fancy delivery truck from the Biltmore Dairy out on the estate.

But since Brenda was herself a country woman at heart, all of this leisure only made her nervous, and she tended to flutter around Frank when he was home like some kind of moth or butterfly. I almost said like a butterfly around horse droppings, for we’ve all seen that, but that image wouldn’t be fair to Frank.

Because to be fair to Uncle Frank, he was enjoying his life immensely. In addition to his salary from the bank, he was also caught up in various real estate investments north of town, out at our end of Charlotte Street where E. W. Grove held sway before he died. He had known Grove, and Grove’s son-in-law Seely personally, and, as I came to find out the second Sunday I was there, the whole family would take Sunday dinner at the Grove Park Inn on a regular basis. Sunday dinner at the Inn, where various personages, even Seely himself, would stop by our table to check in with Uncle Frank. Invariably, they would ask about the bank, and Frank would nod sagely and say, Solid as a rock, my friend, solid as a damn rock. Even I, the country cousin, was occasionally invited and got to see this grand performance play out.

So you see, Uncle Frank’s carefully groomed clothes along with his gold watch chain and his initialed cufflinks were all part and parcel of his accumulated life. His round, red, closely-shaven face, his carefully barbered, gray hair, even his one gold tooth—all those things spoke to who he was and who he knew. He was never without a smile for the ladies or a grin and wink for the men, and after dinner, he was never without a cigar. Cuban, or so he said.

Sissy assumed her father was rich. Her brother, Frank Junior, assumed the same. You couldn’t tell what Aunt Brenda thought; she was too fluttery. What I thought was wait and see.

And as things unfolded, I did see.

4

THE NEXT MONDAY MORNING I went to work at the Central Bank and Trust on the square. My uncle deigned that I should ride downtown with him in his motorcar, although that rarely happened once our different routines were established. The bank opened its doors at 9:00, and by midweek, I was letting myself in the alley door for employees by 8:30. Uncle Frank often didn’t show up till almost lunchtime, depending on what sort of breakfasts and community meetings he had on his calendar.

That first morning, he turned me over to Foster Reynolds, the head cashier, who squired me around the first floor, which was all solid, white marble. Most of the space was taken up by neat little cashiers’ cubicles with barred windows, through which the cashiers dealt with customers. He introduced me to various other cashiers, who were to man those cubicles during the day. I say man with a wink, because they were mostly men older than me, some in their thirties, and only a few women.

Mr. Reynolds then took me up to the second floor, where I was to be trained during that first day, along with a nervous young man named Joshua Breed. Reynolds himself was too important to actually teach us what was involved in the job, so he turned us over to Mable. That was her only name as far as I could tell … Mable. So, for the morning, it was Mr. Breed, Mable, and me … Josephine. And in fact, that was part of the training. When we talked to customers, we were to refer to the women by their first names, unless they were ancient wives of important men and so earned Missus status. All men were Misters. Mable winked at me for the first time that morning during this part of the indoctrination.

Mable had been at the bank for over ten years and was assistant to the head cashier. She was a short, wide, middle-aged woman with hair dyed an impossible shade of red. Everything but her hair and her attitude was what you might expect. She might have been my aunt … or yours. But the hair was startling. You blinked in disbelief when you saw it for the first time and for the next ten times after that. Same with her attitude. Moxie. That’s what I learned to say after a few days. Mable had a lot of moxie.

She also wore a pair of spectacles pushed down on her nose. She regarded everything through the spectacles, or at least everything she didn’t already have memorized. And when she stared hard at you over the spectacles, your insides withered a little whether you’d made a mistake or not.

She took us through savings accounts, personal and business. Passbook accounts that required the customer to have the passbook in hand to do business. Checking accounts, which most businesses had but very few individuals. Deposits and withdrawals. Interest.

I asked about loans and she explained that neither Joshua nor I would work those windows in the beginning. That was a different department and it required special training. You’ll get a shot at it, if you want it, she reassured me. The loan department, even just the cashiers in the loan department, aren’t having any fun these days. Mostly them hick farmers coming to offer a chicken or a bushel of apples for payment, complaining about how hard times are out in the country.

I started to mention that maybe I was one of those hick farmers and maybe times were hard out in the country, but I still hadn’t got over her hair, and I didn’t want to start something on my very first day. So I just nodded. And blushed.

Along about 11:00 she gave us the first of two math tests we had to pass before we could work the floor. Fifty problems: half addition and subtraction to two decimal places and half multiplication and division, also to two decimal places. Two decimal places meant dollars and cents, I figured. I did it all in my head, wrote down the answers in the neat little country-girl script that I’d learned from Miss Maud Gentry at Dorland-Bell School, and handed Mable my paper.

She looked at me appraisingly over her half-glasses and then we both tried not to stare at Mr. Breed, who was sweating like a mule in the traces. He was covering his paper and a spare sheet besides with columns of figures and then erasing half of them and beginning again. It got to be 11:30. I distinctly heard Mable’s stomach rumble, and from where I was sitting, Mr. Breed looked to be halfway home. But now he was into some division and up against it.

By 11:45 and Mable was entertaining herself by comparing my paper to an answer sheet she retrieved from the desk. She held both pages carefully up to the well-lit window and stared through her reading glasses to make this comparison. After she was done, she gave me a suspicious look, and it occurred to me that she must think I’d cheated somehow. Maybe because Uncle Frank might have known about the test.

Josephine, she muttered. Have you seen this test before today? That hard look over the glasses.

No, ma’am. I said it with some spunk because I didn’t care for her implications.

What’s seventeen times seventeen?

I told her. Two hundred eighty-nine.

What’s seventeen point seventeen times three?

Fifty-one dollars and fifty-one cents.

Who said anything about dollars and cents?

It’s a bank, isn’t it?

She almost smiled. Not quite but close. What’s one hundred fifty-six divided by twelve?

Easy, I said. It was starting to feel like a game. Thirteen.

What’s twelve divided by thirteen?

That one gave me pause, but not for long. Ninety-two cents if you round off your amount.

She did smile then. And winked. That was her third wink of the morning.

We both turned back to Mr. Breed, who had been brought to the point of desperation by the last five or six problems in the set. I can’t concentrate with you two talking numbers, he whined and swiped at his forehead with a nice, sharply folded handkerchief from his breast pocket.

That’s alright, Mable said. I’m sure you’ve answered enough to show me what you can do. Let me have your paper. And then once she had his sheets of pencil scrawl and erasures in hand, she told us I call it lunch time. See you both back here at one o’clock. And don’t be late. The head cashier wants to give you two his standard lecture.

Mable was right. It was a lecture. By Mr. Foster Reynolds, who joined us from his office somewhere on the second floor. He went on for the better part of an hour, a dapper little man whose hair was so plastered to his scalp with treatment that it looked like it had been combed with a garden rake. During his hour of public relations blather, he asked us a lot of questions and answered them all himself. I can give you the gist of it because I took notes, in the beginning because I thought there might be a test, and then later, when he got going good, it was like watching a political speech or a country preacher on full throttle. I wasn’t sure at the time what half of it meant, but he made it sound important as hell.

Who knows what Robert E. Lee said about the South? That’s how he started out.

Mr. Breed and I shook our heads; we didn’t know. Mable knew but wasn’t telling.

Mr. Foster Reynolds thrust his forefinger into the air. Lee said that when to the intelligence of Southern men we have added the wholesale instinct of saving money, no race will equal us! Reynolds stared at us triumphantly.

Did he say anything about Central Bank and Trust? Breed asked tentatively.

Noooo, but only because we didn’t exist when Lee was alive. We were not chartered until 1903. But we exist because of the foresight and attitude of people like General Lee, who understood the absolute value in saving and investing money.

Didn’t Robert Lee manage to burn down half a continent and still lose the war? Which I thought but didn’t say out loud.

"The bank is the cornerstone of civilized society, and this bank, Mr. Breed and Josephine, this bank is at the very center of civilization in Western North Carolina and in the thriving metropolis of Asheville. Before he died, when Mr. Grove needed money for one of his projects, where did he come to?"

Here? It seemed incredible to me that Grove ever needed a bank. That’s how naïve I was.

Yesss, Jospehine! Reynolds was so excited, he hissed. "Yesss. He walked through the front door of this institution, took the private elevator up to the third floor, and stated his needs, which we were happy to fulfill, just like now when we extend the same courtesy to Mr. Seely, Mr. Grove’s son-in-law. Under the leadership of men like our formidable mayor, Mr. Gallatin Roberts, we are building a new and greater city. Everywhere you look, a beautiful new building is under construction. No more log cabins out back, no more mules in the livery stable! Why, right now, there are at least thirty automobiles parked in Pack Square alone, and the street cars are running day and night.

What is this bank? He stared at us, Breed and me, as if we constituted a crowd.

The cornerstone of … society? Breed tried.

Oh yes, every bit of that. And even more importantly, we … are … the … future. Remember that! This time he wagged his finger for emphasis. "As the city grows under Mr. Roberts’ leadership to include the surrounding areas, we will become known as Greater Asheville, and money will come flooding into this bank like a river, a veritable river. And you, Mr. Breed, and you, Josephine, will be a part of what makes this bank gleam like a beacon on a hill."

He suddenly switched directions. And just who do you think should come to us at Central Bank and Trust with their money? Who? He paused to lower his voice. Everybody should come. Each little lady with her allowance from her husband. Each child whose parents have the foresight to teach them the wisdom of saving money. Even if it’s only a pittance. Even a dollar will do! Say it after me …

Even a dollar will do. Breed and I together, mesmerized.

Even a dollar will do … because a dollar deposited at Central Bank and Trust will become ten dollars, and in time, a hundred dollars, and as Greater Asheville grows and grows, that child who walked through our front doors, holding on to his mother with one hand and his dollar bill with the other, will end up living in Biltmore Forest or Grove Glen or Kenilworth and parking his Packard Roadster on Pack Square. What do you think of that?

How much interest does … I started but Mr. Foster Reynolds cut me off.

"That child will be part of something. He will belong to our vision of a city and a region that is more modern and wealthier than any in America. Now remember this, write it down if you need to. Say it to yourself over and over so that you can repeat it to our customers when they walk in the door. As the city grows, Central Bank and Trust grows; and as the bank grows, each customer grows. Until every man is his own Vanderbilt! … Have you got it?"

What about every woman? I thought. Who is she?

Every man his own … Vanderbilt. Breed was mouthing the words as he wrote them out with his pencil.

Foster Reynolds glanced at me. Got it, I told him. City grows, bank grows, every man a Vanderbilt.

Yesss, he said.

The second-floor training broke up mid-afternoon. Mr. Breed and I were to return the next morning for one more session with Mable plus the second math test and then begin shadowing an experienced cashier. As we were leaving, Mable pulled me aside. She held one ink-stained finger up to her lips, and we paused to let Breed trudge wearily on down the hall toward the stairs. After a moment, she shut the door quietly behind him, leaving us alone in the training room.

Listen, dearie, she said. Do you want some advice?

I nodded. All I can get, I said.

Well, then. Two things for now. One, don’t show off. Don’t let them see how fast you are with the math. It only upsets them. I started to speak but she shook her head to shush me. Listen, Breed is a dolt. You and I know that, but he’s the son of a prominent lawyer in town, and so there’s a place for him at the bank. He will be paid ten cents an hour more than you for doing the same job and doing it poorly. Don’t let it upset you and don’t show off. Keep your own counsel and before long, they’ll discover just how much they need you.

Is that what happened to you?

She smiled and nodded.

You said there were two things …

Two for today. She said it as if there were a lot more lessons to follow. Do something with your hair.

What do you mean? I asked. I had my mother’s hair, shades of nut brown with hints of red woven in, and I was proud of it.

It hangs nearly to your waist, dearie. And everybody in this town who sees it knows at a glance that you just climbed down off the turnip wagon from Madison County.

What should I do?

For now, put it up in a bun on the back of your head. Let ’em see your neck.

I nodded, and she started to open the door.

Wait, I said. How do you get away with … that? I gestured at the fire-engine red mass on top of her own head.

She grinned. I get away with it because I’m an institution, she said. She gestured around us at the second floor. I get away with it because I trained all these little cock-suckers. Including Mister Foster Reynolds.

5

I FIGURED THAT IF ANYBODY KNEW what she was talking about when it came to the inner workings of Central Bank and Trust, it was Mable the institution. Day two, I swept my hair back and rolled it up into a bun on the back of my head. Five bobby pins. After all, I’d done something similar every day when I went outside to work on the farm. Try hoeing out corn rows with your hair hanging down around your face dripping sweat and you get the idea why. I would have asked Sissy what she thought, but she was still asleep when I left the house that morning to walk to the bank. Her Realtor didn’t expect her till mid-morning.

The other thing I tried was face powder. I had found a powder compact in my mother’s ancient pocketbook. A little round number that she could only have bought at Penland’s Store in Marshall. I’d seen her use it once or twice on a Sunday, so I had a vague idea. I took the soft little puff and threw a little on my nose and cheekbones, figuring to hide the freckles if nothing else. And then puffed a little more hoping to get something like an even effect.

So there I was. My legs freshly shaved—for the first time above the knee—my hair up, and my nose powdered. Nobody stared at me on the sidewalk while I was walking to the bank, so I must not have gone too far wrong.

As I