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his faithful older son? Just once, Ethel would have liked to see the older son get some credit.
    But the Reverend Darling – what a name! – like every minister she’d ever heard, was all caught up with the younger son, the bad son. He was harping on and on about forgiveness, God’s grace, God’s mercy. How the worst things we’ve ever done can be forgiven, no matter what. Ethel looked up at Reverend Darling, his round milk-white face glowing above his black shirt and clerical collar. His hair curled a little around the temples. He looked like a boy. Little he knows, Ethel thought.
    The small but determined choir stood to sing the closing hymn: “Just as I Am.” Back home in the Army, if they sang this hymn at the end of a sermon about the Prodigal Son – sang it with loud and lusty voices, a steady thumping beat, and a clatter of tambourines – people would be streaming down the aisles, tears running down their cheeks, kneeling at the mercy seat. This did not happen in the Methodist church. Methodists sat quietly in their pews, hymnbooks open, singing along.
    Just as I am, without one plea,
But that Thy blood was shed for me…
    When she was a girl growing up, Ethel had had a friend, Mary Margaret Murphy, who of course was Catholic. Once she went to St. Patrick’s with Mary Margaret and waited for her to go to Confession. It was dark and mysterious and popish in the big church, and Ethel wondered what went on in the small closet. Mary Margaret was matter-of-fact about it. “I tells Father my sins and he forgives me and tells me how many Hail Marys to say, is all,” she had said. Now Ethel almost wished for a confession booth. Because it couldn’t be that easy, could it? As easy as the hymn made it? Just as I am? Thy love I own has broken every barrier down? Not so easy. Some barriers were bigger than you might think. The lady that wrote that hymn hadn’t done the thing Ethel did. She didn’t know.
    The hymn was over: the minister was praying. Ethel did not know what foolishness she had been thinking, or what it was she wanted so much she could almost cry. But she prayed along with the minister, prayed silently for the first time in months. I’m going to try harder, God. I’ll be here every Sunday. I’ll be a good wife to Jim and a good mother to Ralphie, and I won’t complain. I’ll be the best you ever saw, I promise. Only please, please…
    She did not know how to end it. Reverend Darling said Amen, the organist played the postlude, and she stood up and walked out with Jean and the youngsters. She felt better and stronger, like her backbone had been reinforced with steel.

ROSE   BROOKLYN, MAY 1927
    T HE BELL ON THE door clangs again. Rose peers over the edge of the ornate gold cash register, praying it’s someone who doesn’t matter, hoping she can stay sitting down. Her feet are killing her, even with her shoes kicked off. If it’s a young kid or something, she doesn’t have to stand up until they actually come up to the counter. Except she might have to watch to see if they’re stealing.
    It isn’t a kid. It’s a middle-aged woman, all starched and pressed in a pink cloth coat, the kind who expects to see a shop girl standing behind the counter and will complain to the manager if she doesn’t. With a heavy sigh, Rose lays down her cup of tea and stands up, pressing on a smile.
    â€œHelp you with anything today, ma’am?” she calls out as the woman begins to paw through tables of five-and-dime merchandise. The woman ignores her.
    Rose keeps a mental list of jobs that would be worse than working at Freedman’s Five and Dime. Being a maid, of course that was worse. Her first New York job was working for Mrs. Clark, who was more picky than Rose’s own mother ever was. Rose quickly got tired of the smell of brass and silver polish, of the horrible brass cabinet knobs and the silver