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around the train’s timetable, so as not to have such a shriek interrupt a soliloquy or pledge of lasting loyalty.
    Dez began to feel irritated. What did Abby expect? They were in the middle of a national economic failure, after all. And a theater that had been sitting empty was nothing like the nights it had seen, every moment changing from one production to the next, never exactly the same show twice. So different from the movies. She described Kathryn Tranero as Cleopatra in 1925, how the crowd stamped its feet so hard all the frames hung crooked on the walls the next day. “We had her here just as her career started to go crazy. My father contracted her that spring, then in summer
Queen of the Nile
came out. When she arrived in August, the newspapermen took up an entire floor of the hotel.”
    But it was like looking at a very old woman and saying,
She was beautiful in her youth
. And they both knew it.
    “I suppose it’s hard on you without Rose.”
    Dez blinked back sudden emotion. “That goes without saying.”
I might live twenty more years
, Rose said, once it was clear Asa wouldn’t offer her a room.
Can’t last on savings all that time, can’t risk ending up in the poorhouse
.
    “If we could, I’d do it,” Asa had said privately to Dez. But they were going to need those rooms eventually. Better for Rose to move to her sister’s now, while she still had her health.
    Dez remembered Rose, stoic and dry-eyed until the hour she boarded the train to Chicago, then her face crumpled in a way that Dez could still see when she closed her eyes.

    On Spruce Street, Lil Montgomery bumped into them, on her way out of the Telephone & Telegraph office where she worked. Her hair was rolled up under a drab hat that was doing everything it could to take away from the smartness of the bottle-green tunic jacket she was wearing.
    “Abby, you remember me talking about Lil. We’ve been friends all our lives. Lil, here’s my friend Abby, from Boston.” Thinking,
Please muster up some enthusiasm, show Abby that Cascade still is, at heart, a vibrant, welcoming place
. But Lil asked, oh, was Abby a woman artist, too—not even remembering who Abby was, though Dez had certainly mentioned her enough times. Lil sighed and said it was a shame Abby had picked such a dismal time to come, and Dez realized that Lil was always sighing—sighing if someone on the other end of the line took too long to give her the telephone number they wanted to connect to, sighing if Zeke was out of the butter beans she was counting on for her supper. All those sighs had had the effect of giving her chest a slightly collapsed appearance, as if it were just steeling itself for more disappointment.
    “I remember you talking about her,” Abby said when Lil was out of earshot. She suddenly squealed, and clutched Dez’s wrist. “Wait—was she the one—?”
    Yes. Lil was.
    It had all come out in a terrible burst just before the wedding, a lashing out, a detailing of everything about Dez that had always bothered Lil. It had come out because Frederick Marsh, Lil’s date for the wedding, left abruptly for Ohio for a chance at a forty-dollar-a-month job with the Civilian Conservation Corps, and because Dez made the error of confessing to Lil her mixed feelings about her upcoming hasty marriage.
    Lil’s spew had boiled down to this:
What kind of woman wouldn’t be happy to be marrying Asa Spaulding?
    Had Lil harbored secret hopes regarding Asa? It seemed so.
    “She apologized almost immediately. She’s just one of those people who keeps things bottled up until she explodes, then embarrasses herself.”
    But Dez had been more unsettled than she had wanted to admit. What was the nature of a friendship that could sour so easily? It was the nature of life in a small community. People chose friends and spouses from the small, available pool. It did not matter which small town you lived in. You would find a friend, a spouse in any old place. The next day,