Book 1: It's My Money
If little girls were made of sugar and spice and everything nice so was Susanna Carter, but those ingredients had been mixed with steel cut oatmeal and stone ground flour. Her eyes sparkled Irish green, and a Milky Way of freckles floated just below the surface of her smooth pale skin.
Squatting in a dirt patch she used a stick to dig up a lead slug. Her knees bumped her ears while she worked. Finally after dislodging the metal disk, she dropped it in a tin can that was half full. Her tall lean body unfolded, and she stretched to her full height. She squinted at the morning sun, carried the can to the side of her house, and positioned it on a window sill next to other cans she had already filled with slugs.
Cigarette smoke infused with the smell of coffee wafted through the screen of the open window. Neighborhood mothers socialized at that time of day in someone’s or another’s kitchen, and today they were gathering at Susanna’s home.
She turned and surveyed the partially built houses that made up most of her neighborhood. Hammers rang from them like gun shots and echoed through eleven nearly identical structures, the first homes in the subdivision to be completed. The striving young families—including hers—that now occupied them worked hard every day trying to figure out how to live in the aftermath of the Great Depression followed by the Second World War.
The hammer wielded by a man in the rafters of an incomplete house stopped abruptly so he could yell at Susanna’s older brother. “Hey, kid! Get out of here!”
Jimmy stopped rummaging through a pile of scrap lumber, tar paper, and other construction debris. He looked up, shaded his eyes with a dirty hand, and shouted back, “Can I have this plywood?”
The man thought before giving in. “Sure, if you’re big enough to carry it off, but stay out of the way. Otherwise, you’ll get hurt.”
Jimmy needed the board for his own construction project, a fort that grew in the family’s backyard. He got lumber from trash dumps and scavenged for nails with Susanna when the carpenters weren’t looking. She also collected the slugs electricians knocked out of conduit boxes when they wired the houses. Jimmy had seen her pocket them, but they had no construction purpose, so they held no value for him.