“What’s the point of running around a track anyway? It’s a waste of time, I tell you.” He tugged at his suspenders to hitch up his trousers. “Put all that physical activity into something useful.”
“I was good at it. Coach Moore and those other boys on the team looked at me like I was important.”
“Who cares what a bunch of pimple-faced roughnecks thought?”
Helen scrubbed at the filthy rake, but then stopped. She had an idea. “You know, they weren’t all hicks. I was leaving John Harris in the dust.”
“Harris? The banker’s boy?”
“That’s right. I’ve been thinking, I’ll bet it was Harris who told all that stuff to the newspaper. I think he wanted me off the team because he didn’t like being beaten by me, a lowly farmer’s daughter.”
In truth, John Harris had been perfectly nice to her, but she had a suspicion of how to get her father’s attention.
He narrowed his eyes. “You were beating the tar out of the banker’s son?”
“Yeah, I had all of those fellas choking on my cinder.”
He grunted and headed off to the pegboard to bring her more tools that needed cleaning and oiling. They didn’t speak any more about track. That evening, he was preoccupied at supper and barely spoke. When they finished eating, Pa sat back with a pipe and played checkers with Bobbie Lee while watching Helen and Ma washing dishes out of the corner of his eye.
Eventually, he cleared his throat. “This is going to be a busy spring as we get the new farm up and running. Helen, I reckon I’m going to need you to come home a few afternoons a week to help. We’ll be closer to town, though, so it won’t be a long walk. I’ve been thinking that once we’re settled, maybe next year you could go back to running on that track team, but only if you keep up with your chores.”
Ma’s hands froze in the sudsy water, and she turned sideways to look at Helen in surprise.
Helen kept her own face blank as she dried off a pan and placed it in the crate of kitchen supplies they’d be taking with them. “I’ll keep up with everything.”
Her father nodded, stood, and left the kitchen to head out to the living room to read the newspaper.
Helen lifted the crate of kitchen goods and hefted it out the kitchen door to the spot on the porch where her mother had started organizing what needed to be moved to the new farm they’d be leasing. She put the crate down and straightened, smiling into the darkness. Though the air was cold and her breath left vapor trails swirling up into the darkness, she didn’t even notice. She was already thinking ahead to the next spring.
33.
May 1934
Riverdale, Illinois
BETTY DECIDED SHE WOULDN’T RELY ON HER FATHER to pay off her medical bills. She would do it herself. Jim, her brother-in-law, helped her find a job as a secretary in an architecture firm. The straightforward nature of the work suited her. The clarity of the daily schedule. The project deadlines. The clean angles and precision of the measurements on the blueprints. She enjoyed watching the projects take shape from schematics on crisp white sheets of paper to photographs of the final structures. Even with the stalled economy, new buildings were sprouting up around the city.
Betty continued to live at home with her parents, so after a year of working, she had nearly paid off her debts. She socialized with a couple of the other secretaries from work, friends from her school days, and, of course, Caroline and Howard, who were expecting their first baby sometime the following fall.
Jim worked near her office as a professor of economics at the University of Chicago, and when the weather obliged, the two would meet for lunch and sit outside in the main quad. On an afternoon in late May, they sat enjoying the balmy sunshine from underneath the lacy leaves of the honey locust trees in Dan Hall Garden. Betty inhaled the sweet fragrance of the clusters of light green flowers on the trees and placed her chicken salad sandwich on its butcher paper wrapping. Her gaze traveled over the gray limestone architecture surrounding them. “I love the Gothic stonework of this place. It reminds me of Amsterdam.”
“It does feel like Europe,” Jim agreed, his jaw tightening.
Jim never spoke of the time he spent overseas serving in the Great War. He and Jean married shortly after he came back from Europe. Betty remembered little from when he returned home because she had been so young, but she could still summon sober-faced conversations between Jean and her parents in the days before the wedding and the word shell-shocked being whispered repeatedly.
“I suppose our experiences in Europe must have been very different,” she said.
Jim stared through the park, lost in thought. “Say, what would you think about trying to run again?”
“No.”
“You won’t even consider it?”
Betty shook her head. Since ending things with Bill, she had tried to push all thoughts of running from her mind. “I don’t run anymore.”
“But maybe it would be good for you. I’ll help. We can go out together in the mornings before we leave for work.”
Suddenly Betty felt overwhelmingly tired. “Jim, simply getting to the train every day is a struggle. Everything still hurts. I can’t.”
“But what if it makes you feel better?”
Betty let out a strangled laugh. She shifted in her seat and her spine made a cracking sound. “Haven’t you noticed? I’m trapped in the body of an eighty-year-old.”
“I know it might hurt at first, but maybe getting those muscles moving again could help. You’ve had a tough go of it, but you could run again if you put your mind to it.”
Betty was about to snap at him, tell him to mind his own business, but something held her back. About two years ago, Dr. Minke had told her she might never walk again, but he had underestimated her. He’d also told
