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Mrs. Booker always tried hard to please her husband.  Not that he was home much.  All through the war years he’d been away in Washington or traveling around the country.  She and the children were lucky to see him once a year.

Of course, Mrs. Booker wrote to him every day.  After the usual greetings, she would ask his advice.  “Benjy has outgrown his shoes again, and I hardly know what to do.  We only have coupons for one more pair this year, and Lizzie will need shoes, too.  The victory garden, by the way, is infested with some kind of insect, and we might lose everything but the tomatoes.”

At the end of each letter she traced the letters of her given name stiffly, as if they were an artificial construct, a stage name.  After all, no one called her anything but Mrs. Booker these days, except of course the children.  So it wasn’t surprising one evening when she forgot and signed her letter to her husband with “Love, Mrs. Booker.” Luckily she caught it in time, clucked at herself, and copied the letter over again.  She didn’t want Mr. Booker to know how silly she was.

She tended to follow his lead because he had traveled widely, held important positions, and generally was smarter about everything than she was.  Until she married him, she had never even lived in a big city.  But she enjoyed Cincinnati, where she found herself comfortable with a book group, the League of Women Voters, and a chamber music society.  It was housekeeping that made her nervous.

Mr. Booker wrote back faithfully every week.  “Buy Benjy’s shoes a size big; he’ll grow into them. If Lizzie needs shoes later, try to find some second-hand. And if you’d taken my advice to begin with, you wouldn’t have put in such a big garden. It’s not as if you’d grown up on a farm.” 

That was true, and Mrs. Booker regretted the spurt of patriotism that had led her to have the back yard plowed and planted with beans, squash, corn, tomatoes, and radishes (which the children wouldn’t eat), with a border of marigolds all around. She was working back there in a sundress and a big floppy hat, making a halfhearted effort to scratch away the weeds, when she spotted the mailman coming up the street.  It was Thursday, the day Mr. Booker’s letter usually arrived, so she dropped the hoe and ran to intercept him.

Today’s letter brought unexpected news.  “Now that the war is winding down, I’m being transferred to the West Coast for a year to close up our facilities there. If you can manage to come out with the children and furniture, we’ll have a normal home life again.  You shouldn’t have any trouble renting out the house. Meanwhile I’ll look for something in San Francisco or Berkeley.”

Mrs. Booker was ecstatic.  Her husband back again! She pictured him at home in the evenings, long legs crossed as he sat in an easy chair reading Rootabaga Stories to the children. Even sixteen-year-old Cammie would listen to those. Or he would pull out the old ukulele for a family song session. Let me call you sweetheart.  Down by the old mill stream. Benjy still sang lead along with her, but nine-year-old Lizzie could sing in harmony now. Funny, but they never sang except when Mr. Booker was home.  They seemed to need his steady strumming and mellow baritone to hold them together.

The words normal home life beat in her heart as she told the children, “Daddy is coming home for good, and home will be in California.” Cammie was ready to leave that minute,  Lizzie wailed about leaving her friends, and Benjy looked blank.  He had never lived anywhere but Cincinnati.  For Mrs. Booker, the prospect of moving simply felt right. Ever since Mr. Roosevelt died in April and the war ended in Europe, she could feel a change in the air.  A sense of expectancy, of the world moving on. Now they were moving with it. 

Everything was still rationed, of course. “Dear Alec,” she wrote, “Am I supposed to sell the car and bring the family out on the train?  I don’t have enough gas coupons to drive all the way across the country.  And what about the dog?”  Mr. Booker was very fond of the dog, a large black spaniel he had named Alcibiades.

Mr. Booker, in response, pulled strings in Washington and wrote that she shouldn’t have any trouble getting the extra coupons if she went to a certain agency downtown. Mrs. Booker felt vaguely proud that her husband’s job and family were considered important enough to warrant the extra gas.

But getting the coupons turned out to be difficult.  A woman in a high pompadour and aggressive shoulder pads told her she knew nothing of any such arrangements.  She acted as if Mrs. Booker were a criminal trying to cheat patriotic workers out of their gasoline. Mrs. Booker left in tears.

Mr. Booker, in his weekly letter, said “You must have gone to the wrong office. I told you before, you have to go to section VC.  Why don’t you read my letters more carefully?”

This time she got the coupons.  A cheerful, pudgy man with white hair asked, “What kind of car are you driving?”

“A ‘39 Pontiac.”

“And when did you last get new tires?”

“Why, I’m not sure. I think the original tires are still on there.”

He scrawled something on a small piece of paper and handed it to her with a wink.  It was a chit allowing her to purchase four new tires. 

“But, . . . but, why?” 

“You’ll need them, won’t you, if you’re driving all the way to California?”

“I guess so, yes.  Thank you.” She felt uneasy, as if together they were doing something underhanded.

“Come back any time,” the man called.  But she hurried off down the hall to the elevator.

Then she made a mistake on the lease for the new tenants, writing in the wrong date, and all of a sudden there they were, unloading their furniture in the front yard.  “But we’re still living here,” she cried. “You’re not supposed to come till the middle of the month.”  But they pulled out the lease and showed her where she herself had written July first, not the fifteenth as she remembered.

“Oh, dear.  Our moving company isn’t coming for two more weeks.  I don’t suppose there’s anywhere else you could stay?”

There was not.  The only thing to do was to let them come in, a strange family with all their furniture and two children and everyone on top of each other higgledy-piggledy.  The children loved it and played hide-and-seek behind the strange sofas and tables. 

“It’s wartime,” she wrote to Mr. Booker. “I guess these things are bound to happen.”

But Mr. Booker replied, “I find it hard to believe a grown woman could be so careless.  Make sure you label our things so the movers get them all.”

She wrote, “You’re right, of course.  It was terribly stupid of me.  But we seem to be managing all right.” She had already labeled their boxes, even before his letter came, and she had become quite friendly with the tenants. They shared the kitchen and dining room and even had some of their meals together. Altogether, it was a convivial two weeks, and Mrs. Booker didn’t mind at all. 

Mr. Booker wrote detailed instructions about their trip. “Assuming you average three hundred miles a day, you could make it out here in a week. Cammie can help drive, now that she has her learner’s permit. Stay in cabin camps, if you can, to economize. I’m still looking for a house.  Seems as if the whole country is converging on the West Coast, and housing is tighter than a drum.  You’d better go stay with your folks for a few days, even though Nebraska is out of the way. And arrange with the moving company to put the furniture in their warehouse till we have a place.”

Trying hard to cope with this avalanche of suggestions, Mrs. Booker was nevertheless cheered by the thought of seeing her parents and wrote to them right away. She also spent extra time in the car with Cammie, hoping the child could learn to use the clutch without stalling the engine at every corner.  

The day before the movers came, Mrs. Booker and Cammie packed the car. Clothes and picnic basket went in the trunk.  In the space between the front and back seats, they wedged boxes of pots and dishes, wrapped in kitchen towels so they wouldn’t jiggle.  Over the boxes and across the back seat they spread old kapok mats, striped with red and blue ticking.  On top of them went pillows so the younger children could sprawl and be comfortable throughout the trip.  The dog would ride with them.

The day of departure dawned hot and sticky, but everything was ready. The car sported new tires, the gas coupons were tucked in her purse, and a map on which Mr. Booker had marked a string of towns roughly three hundred miles apart was carefully folded in the glove compartment.    

The moving van pulled away, the younger children climbed into the back seat, and Mrs. Booker sent Cammie to the back yard to collect the dog.  The tenants’ children hung on the porch railing, ready to wave goodbye. Cammie was just coming around the garage, her arms wrapped around the dog, when she tripped over a garden hose. The dog bounded away. Mrs. Booker, with a sigh of exasperation, got out of the car to corral him.  But Cammie needed help. Her face twisted in pain, and she was having trouble getting back on her feet. 

“Cammie, what’s wrong?”

“My ankle!  I can’t stand on it.”

Concerned, Mrs. Booker helped Cammie hop over to the passenger seat. “Can you move it at all?”

Cammie grimaced but slowly moved her ankle up and down, then around in a circle.

“Not broken, thank goodness.,” Mrs. Booker said.  “We’ll stop for ice on the way out of town  and maybe it won’t swell up too much.”  Then she went to collect the dog herself, installed him in the back seat with the children, and backed out of the driveway as all the children hollered goodbye to each other.

By late afternoon Cammie’s ankle was twice its usual size and throbbing, so they stopped early at a motel.  Total mileage for the day, one hundred eighty miles, and Mr. Booker’s careful itinerary was already useless.

In the morning Cammie’s sprained ankle was a little better, but of course she couldn’t drive with it.  The trip fell into a slow but tiring routine. Mrs. Booker drove eight or ten hours a day all by herself, which she was unaccustomed to doing. After she found ice for Cammie’s ankle, settled arguments between Lizzie and Benjy, and trailed behind a surprising number of large trucks, they rarely made more than two hundred miles a day. Mrs. Booker was exhausted. The only part she enjoyed was walking the dog.

If they were lucky, they ended up in a neat farm town with green lawns and, on Main Street, shops and cafés. If there was no café, they ate sandwiches from their supplies. On the outskirts would be a motel or cabin camp shaded by trees. 

In the evenings after writing her daily epistle to her husband, Mrs. Booker stayed up to study maps she obtained at gas stations, trying to plot the next day’s route.  She made a point of avoiding large cities, with all their confusion and extra traffic, but she had no choice about Kansas City. Mr. Booker had said he would send a letter to the post office there, care of General Delivery.

Kansas City lay broiling under the July sun when they left the highway and hunted through a tangle of streets for the post office.  Cammie, with the map of Kansas open on her lap, tried to give directions, but the inset city map was very small.  By the time Mrs. Booker entered the post office, she felt frazzled and wished Mr. Booker could have sent the letter to a small town like Boonville, where they had stayed the night before.  Besides, she dreaded opening his letter, as they were already three days behind the schedule he had set.

But no letter was waiting.  The clerk, a middle-aged woman, said, “Are you sure he said Kansas City, Kansas?” She had a stern-looking jaw, but her blue eyes were sympathetic. “Maybe he meant Kansas City, Missouri.” 

“Oh, dear, are there two of them?” It was one more thing to slow them down and complicate this trip.

“Yes, ma’am. Two cities with the same name. People often get them mixed up.”

Mrs. Booker appreciated her saying that but still felt chagrined. Backtracking through the unfamiliar streets and crossing the river took over an hour. They had to stop twice to ask directions, and the nearest parking space was three blocks away.  But the letter was waiting, and she was relieved to finally hold it in her hand.

“Dear Velma,” she read, “this should find you a good way on your journey.  I hope it’s going well.  Don’t forget to fill the gas tank first chance you get whenever the gauge reads half-empty; there aren’t nearly as many gas stations as before the war. And be sure to carry a five-gallon tank in the trunk.”  Mrs. Booker was already following these instructions, given in a previous letter.  “You’ll be glad to know a suitable house in Berkeley is almost within our grasp, though it needs some work. I’m negotiating with the owner now. By the time you reach your folks in Cedar Ridge, I should have more definite news.  Looking forward, as always, to seeing you and the children.”  

These familiar closing words, scant as they were, gave Mrs. Booker a little shiver of happiness.  Looking forward to seeing you.  Oh, yes.  Even though they were running behind schedule, she knew she would see him soon, return his bright grin and feel his strong arms around her. 

That evening, in the endless wheat fields west of Topeka, they couldn’t find any place to stay. The sun poured shafts of light through towering dark clouds, and they drove on and on into a dramatic sunset.  There were no towns, no cabin camps, but Mrs. Booker, heartened by her husband’s letter, drove into the dusk with calm assurance.  Something was bound to turn up. Finally, when it was almost dark, she stopped at a prosperous-looking farmhouse, white with neat green trim. 

A harried-looking woman came to the door. “Yes?”

Mrs. Booker did her best to sound respectable.  “I’m driving west from Ohio with my children to join my husband on the coast.  He told me to stay in cabin camps, but — well, there don’t seem to be any around here.  Is there any chance you could give us a place to sleep tonight?”  She didn’t want the woman to think they were Okies.

“How many children?”

“Three.  My daughter is sixteen, and the other two are nine and six.”

The woman nodded.  “Four dollars for the spare room, and the two youngsters can sleep on the porch.”

Not a cordial welcome, but much better than spending the night in the car.  Mrs. Booker walked the dog, then tied him to the bumper of the car. Lizzie was enchanted with the idea of playing house on the porch and hauled the kapok mats out of the car to make beds for herself and Benjy. Cammie spread a scanty meal on the porch table.

The farmwife, seeing the Booker family’s peanut butter sandwiches and can of fruit cocktail, brought out cold milk and a peach pie.  “We usually eat dinner in a restaurant,” Mrs. Booker apologized, “but of course that isn’t possible tonight.  Thank you so much for the pie. It’s delicious.”  

At that, the farmwife unbent enough to say that her husband had gone to Kansas City; his uncle was sick.  “Leaving me with all the animals. Who needs them anyway, I’d like to know?  They don’t grow us any wheat.”

That night the clouds came together in a lashing storm, and strong winds shook the house. Awakened by thunder, Mrs. Booker got up to look out the window. Lightning flashed, illuminating the raining world in a greenish glow, and a yellowish light flickered inside the barn.  Thinking it might be a fire set off by the lightning, she peered more closely and saw the dark figure of the farmwife standing in the barn. Curious, and unable to go back to sleep, Mrs. Booker pulled on a pair of sandals and went down in her nightgown to see what would take anyone out on such a night. 

The air was still warm, and the rain beating down felt suddenly familiar.  Once, long ago, she had played in rain like this, splashing through puddles while Ma stood on the porch laughing.  Now, holding out her hands in the downpour, she circled like a dancer in the muddy barnyard, letting the rain wash over her. By the time she reached the barn she was drenched, her nightgown plastered against her body.  Whatever possessed her, she wondered, to do such a silly thing. 

The farmwife looked up, surprised, when Mrs. Booker entered the barn. In the light of the kerosene lantern, her face looked more drawn than ever.  “Here,” she tossed Mrs. Booker a burlap sack.  “Dry yourself off.” Only it wasn’t the respectable wife and mother from Cincinnati but five-year-old Velma who dried her arms with the rough sack. She watched as the farmwife wiped and cradled two tiny goats, newly born.  They seemed to be all legs.  “Late born,” said the farmwife, “but I think they’ll make it.  Here, can you take one?”

Velma sank onto a pile of burlap sacks, took one of the gangly kids into her lap, and began to rub it gently with a handful of straw.  Beneath her hand the kid’s rough fur became warm, and the tiny heart beat rapidly. “It’s all right,” she murmured. “It’s all right.”  After a few minutes, with a few final strokes, she stood the kid on its spindly legs beside the mother’s teat. But she was in no hurry to leave the barn.  The rain drummed steadily on the roof, the farmwife was busy in the back room, and all around her were the soft breathing and rustling of farm animals, the smell of earth and hay. 

In the morning the farmwife still didn’t have much to say, but she made eggs and toast for them and brought out homemade rhubarb-pineapple preserves. “Nice having you folks,” she said as they drove away.

The world felt rinsed after the storm.  The sky was cloudless, the sun no longer oppressive.  Mrs. Booker felt happy and alert, and the children were calmer. When they reached Cedar Ridge late the following day, the sense of rejuvenation was still with her.

“Oh, child, it’s so good to see you,” her mother said, holding her tight.  “How was the trip?” Mrs. Booker could truthfully say she was fine, the trip had been fine, and no, she was not tired at all.  But she was awfully glad to see her folks.

Mr. Booker’s letter had not come yet, but everyone was so busy that Mrs. Booker didn’t mind the wait. Cammie took long sunbaths in the back yard, or played double solitaire on the porch with her younger sister.  Lizzie went down to the public library by herself and lugged home a stack of Oz books. Benjy helped hold Alcibiades as Daddy gave the dog a close haircut. Mrs. Booker was horrified.  Spaniels were supposed to have feathers!   “A pup needs it cool in the summer time,” Daddy said. “They’ll grow back.” Ma began sewing a new dress for Cammie. Mrs. Booker even picked out a few tunes on the piano, something she hadn’t done for years.

On a hot afternoon in mid-August, that peaceful life received a momentous jolt. “The war is over!  The Japanese have surrendered!” the radio newscaster shouted. The entire family huddled around the old Philco, getting as close as possible to the small, cloth-covered speaker. Details piled in—the Japanese emperor, General MacArthur, a ceremony on a battleship.  Later that evening, a government official came on the air and announced that gas rationing was over.  Right away.  Forever.  Mrs. Booker’s heart leaped.

The next morning she piled the children into the car and drove to a gas station “Fill ‘er up!” she called, laughing because it seemed so odd and bold to say those words.

The attendant, a high school kid, noticed the Ohio license plate. “You folks really from Ohio?”  He glanced at the children, Cammie in the passenger seat, Lizzie and Benjy in the back. “How’d you get all the way out here?”

 “Drove!” Benjy shouted.  “We’re moving to California.”

“Your daddy with you?”

“No, just us,” Mrs. Booker said. 

The boy’s eyes widened. “Say, that’s something.  A lady driving all the way across the country like that, just you and the kids.” Mrs. Booker hadn’t thought of it that way, but she guessed maybe it was something. That made her feel good, admired, all the way back home.

Finally the long-expected letter arrived.  “The house is ours,” Mr. Booker said. “Two stories, three bedrooms. Roofers and painters in short supply, but I found a crew to start next Wednesday.  If you can, get here by Tuesday. That would be best.  Looking forward, as always, to seeing you and the children.” 

But Mrs. Booker, on the shady porch of her parent’s bungalow, stood almost absent-minded, the letter hanging loose in her hand.  She could be out there in less than a week, see the husband who had been in her mind constantly for more than three years. She saw herself in an apron, the children clustered behind her as she opened the door wide to her smiling husband who came springing up the steps. But in her mind she was not smiling. 

 “Dear Alec,” she wrote that night, “Your letter came today, but it’s been a long, hard trip so far. I think we’ll stay on here with the folks a few more weeks.” As she wrote, the long journey across the plains dissolved into a sun-filled haze. Life flowed gently through green and golden days.  There would be plenty of time, later, to see Alex. “I’m sure that work crew can get along without me. As always, your loving wife, Velma.”