A Wilder Rose: A Novel Read Online Free

now that she has money of her own, I don’t have to. And if I earned royalties from the sales of those books, I’d have to pay income tax on it, at a higher rate than she does. I’m sure you know how I feel about the Infernal Revenue Service. It’s just another way for the government to stick its fingers into our pockets.”
    “Yes, I know,” Norma Lee replied seriously. “You’ve told us about that.” She tilted her head to one side. “But you’ve never told me how you got involved in your mother’s books. You’ve told me about your work as a telegraph operator right out of high school, and the reporting for the Kansas City Post and the Journal and your real-estate career in California . And the feature writing you did for the San Francisco Bulletin during the Great War, and your autobiographical novel and the books you wrote about Jack London and Charlie Chaplin and Henry Ford.”
    “And Herbert Hoover,” Rose said. Her book—Hoover’s first biography—had come out in 1920 and was still selling. The former president might be a scapegoat for the Depression, but he wasn’t forgotten.
    “Oh, yes, President Hoover. And I’ve heard about your travels for the Red Cross in Europe and the Middle East after the war and the two years you lived in Albania with Troub.” She pulled her brows together. “Let’s see—when was that?”
    “We lived there in 1926 and ’27,” Rose replied. Right after the war, in 1919, she’d been hired by the Red Cross Publicity Bureau. She was assigned to travel through devastated Europe and the Balkans and write newspaper articles that would persuade compassionate Americans to contribute to the rebuilding process—through the Red Cross, of course. “Sob stories,” her friend Dorothy Thompson had called her pieces, teasing, although there was certainly plenty to cry over. Rose had visited Albania and fallen in love with the wild landscape, especially the northern mountains and the proud people, the Shala, who lived there . That had been only a decade ago, but it seemed like a century, a millennium. Albania itself was as distant as the moon now, as was the life she and Troub, long estranged, had shared there.
    “And then?” Norma Lee asked. “After Albania?”
    “Then I went back to Rocky Ridge. My parents had both been sick, the winter was terrible that year, and Papa couldn’t get any help at the farm. I thought I would build a tenant house and hire somebody to live there and work the farm, then build a retirement cottage for them. And then I could travel back and forth, from the farm to the city and back to the farm, when I was needed there.” She shook her head heavily, feeling the weight of what she had done. “Foolishness. Idiocy. Dreams and schemes, those houses. A waste of money.” She dropped her voice. “Worse, a waste of time.” A waste of time, yes. But the time had wasted her . Those years, those awful, awful years, when there was no work, when—
    “Really?” Norma Lee said sympathetically. “Was it really that bad?”
    “Worse. There was the crash and farm foreclosures and bank failures—” Rose stopped.
    “Tell me.” Norma Lee leaned forward, her dark eyes intent, searching. “Tell me, please, Mrs. Lane.”
    Rose turned away to glance at the clock. “Time to take that chicken pie out of the oven.” She pushed her chair back and got to her feet. “You go tell Russell to wash up and then you can set the table. We’ll eat in about fifteen minutes.”
    Norma Lee put out her hand. “Tell me,” she said again, more urgently. “I love the stories you’ve told us about all the things you’ve done in your life. And your writing—your work as a writer—is so important to me. But that can’t be the whole story of how you got involved or why you’ve done what you’ve done for your mother . ”
    “I don’t know why you’d want to hear it, Norma Lee.” Rose went to open the oven. “It was an unhappy time. The magazine fiction market hit