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upstairs for offices, and the lavatories, this is it.” He looked from Mother toElizabeth to Grandma Engel to gauge a reaction. Then he wrung his hands and looked at Elizabeth and Frankie. “What do you say, Princess?”
    Elizabeth hesitated. “Well, I mean . . .” She had always been characteristically agreeable to Mother and Daddy’s intentions, but at that moment, amid the filth and threadbare conditions, she was caught between the two of them and wasn’t sure what should be said.
    Frankie, on the other hand, was beginning to feel sorry for her father, not to mention uncomfortable in the silence.
Was that the tiny paw steps of a rat she just heard?
So she gave her biggest grin and lied. “It’s really keen.”
    Daddy’s smile was full of relief. “It is, isn’t it?” He pulled Frankie close and gave her a squeeze.
    Elizabeth quickly recovered and inserted herself. “What are you going to name it?”
    â€œWell,” said Daddy, taking in a deep breath, “I was thinking of Baum’s Restaurant.”
    â€œIt don’t matter what you call it as long as you’ve got a good cook and a bartender who knows how to make a rickey,” said Grandma Engel, opening the door to one of the Frigidaires.
    â€œBaum’s,” said Mother. “Really?”
    Daddy nodded. “A family restaurant run by the Baum family. It will be a lot of hard work, Mildred, but I know we can turn this into something, together.”
    â€œOur own family restaurant,” whispered Mother, as if for the first time she were trying the idea on for size. Before Daddy, Mother owned nothing except for a few housedresses and one pair ofsecondhand T-bar heels. She had quit school in the sixth grade so she could wash dishes at Mr. McGruder’s restaurant and help out her family, who were, like a lot of families, quite underprivileged. Young Mildred Engel had hidden behind garbage cans on the way to Mr. McGruder’s so the truant officer wouldn’t catch her and force her to attend school. She earned twenty cents a day washing dishes and had to stand on a wooden crate to reach the sink. Keeping a nickel of each day’s wages for herself, she gave the rest to Grandma Engel. In a few years, she worked her way up to waitstaff and even tended bar, but never did she imagine she would one day have a place of her own.
    Daddy appraised the room. “I know that we can make this a place of wide renown.”
    Mother nodded and smiled, the color returning to her face.
    There was something about Hermann’s confidence, in everything that he did and dreamed of doing, that made others believe in him, no matter how strange his ideas. Just the year before, he had convinced Inky and Fritz to go in on a peanut farm in east Texas
and
a pineapple orchard in Missouri. This was during the Great Depression, remember, when money was scarce and finding and keeping work nearly impossible. Very few had extra money lying around in banks or stuffed under mattresses, and if they did, they were much too afraid to spend it. Especially on peanut farms and pineapple orchards. But Hermann was different. Not even President Roosevelt’s Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938, which called for a cut in farm production to increase farming prices, could deter him. In those troubled times, he still had hope—and Inky and Fritz, you could say, found his hope contagious.

5
    MOTHER LIKED TO TEASE Daddy that his glass eye made him see the world in nothing but green. And perhaps he did.

6
    AND SPEAKING OF SEEING the world in green, that’s just how Sullen Waterford Price, Esquire, preferred to view it. As president of the Hagerstown Chamber of Commerce, a job which he undertook with immense conviction, Mr. Price made it a point to get to know all of the upstanding businessmen in town and inspire—though some might say
persuade
—them to become paid members of the chamber. Over his