Our office manager, Margaret Atkinson, had taken a well-deserved day off. It was pleasant to work when there was no one else around. Last spring all of the Fiene family’s systems had undergone a major upheaval. The first move had been to hire Zola. The second step was to put Margaret in charge of organizing everything but the county history books. She now kept track of volunteers, ordered the supplies, did the bookwork, and helped with research requests. When I let Margaret start bossing people around she stopped criticizing everything I did. We had even managed to come up with enough money for her to have her own part-time secretary. The hired girl was still in high school and couldn’t spell “cat” without using Spellcheck, but Margaret gained a new spring in her step after she was able to drop “my secretary” into conversations. As I cut and pasted stories and inserted little newspaper clippings for fillers, I suddenly realized we had no immigrant stories in our books.
