The Darling Dahlias and the Silver Dollar Bush

Indeed, the visit had been so enchanting that—if Verna hadn’t already said yes to Walter Tidwell, who was patiently waiting for her to come back to Darling and marry him—she might have stayed on in the City That Care Forgot and lived a satisfying and perhaps even carefree life.

But Ima Gail had no Walter to go home to, so she had stayed. In fact, she was still there, once married, now divorced and working in a bank on Canal Street, in the city’s downtown district. She came back to Darling every so often to visit her mother, dazzling all her high school friends with her chic clothes and stylish coif. The last time she was home, she had confessed to Verna that the city didn’t seem quite so magical as it had when they were nineteen, now that so many of the elegant townhouses and Creole mansions had turned shabby and unkempt, like once-proud matrons down on their luck.

But the Café du Monde still had the best chicory coffee in the world, and when you walked down Bourbon and Dauphin, jazz and blues still poured like liquid velvet from every open door.

“I love the nightlife,” Ima Gail had said, “and the music and the food and the people. I even love my bank job.” Shaking her head, she’d added, “To tell the truth, I don’t know how you stand it here in this backwater of a town, Verna. Nothing ever happens here. Nothing at all!”

That wasn’t strictly true, Verna thought. There had been plenty of excitement in Darling over the past couple of years, what with Bunny Scott getting herself killed, and Al Capone’s ex-girlfriend moving in with her aunt across the street from the Dahlias’ clubhouse, and the theft from the county’s bank accounts, and all that furor over the Texas Star and her flying circus. In fact, as far as Verna was concerned, life had been a little too exciting lately. She realized, though, that Ima Gail—who was now a city girl—might not agree.

Ima Gail’s first job had been as a teller at the Bienville Bank and Trust, and she was now a loan officer there. Verna hoped that she might know—or be able to find out—whether the mysterious Mr. Duffy was who he said he was. That was the phone call Verna intended to make, and since she didn’t have a home telephone number for Ima Gail, she had to make it during business hours.

So at four thirty sharp, she walked into the Darling Telephone Exchange office and took the chair next to Rona Jean. The switchboard might look complicated, but it hadn’t changed a bit since Mrs. Hooper had taught Verna to operate it several years before. A marvel of modern technology, it worked on a relatively simple system—simple, that is, as long as you kept your mind on what you were doing and didn’t stick the right plug into the wrong socket, or vice versa.

Verna and Rona Jean were sitting in front of a vertical board that displayed rows of empty sockets, one for every individual or party line in town, and a horizontal board with a dozen pairs of cords with phone jacks on the ends. When a caller—Bessie Bloodworth, say—rang the switchboard, a tiny bulb began blinking above her socket on the vertical board. Rona Jean would pull out one of a pair of cords from the horizontal board, plug the jack into Bessie’s socket, and say, “Number, please,” into her headset microphone. When Bessie gave the number or said, “Rona Jean, honey, please ring up the grocery store for me,” Rona Jean would plug the other cord into the Hancock’s Grocery socket and send a signal down the line to ring the phone on the wall behind the grocery store counter, under a big yellow cardboard sign advertising Brown’s Mule Chewing Tobacco—“Every bite tastes right.”