Herlong

Carl, Lillian and Richard, the baby, moved up and down the State of California as Carl followed one job after another. Pearl Harbor was attacked, and Carl enlisted in the Navy, leaving Lillian for good or ill. Lillian had to work, placing her toddler in foster care and working a series of low paying jobs until she ended up at Alcoa which was a good job monetarily. She herself lived with a couple, the illustrious Hallmonds, who had taken her in after a fight she'd had with her roommate, Clara. The Hallmonds' had a dignified house in a good neighborhood. They offered consistent hospitality the whole time with she was with them, and Lillian would show her lasting gratitude by keeping in touch with cards and letters for years afterward. She was pretty well situated had she not had her boy. She'd landed on her feet after Carl had disappeared. Except for Richard, stuck in that terrible home, which was the only reason she took a tip from her sister in Portola to move back to the middle of nowhere, to a job at a remote military base, a munitions depot stuck way out at the Eastern edge of the state in a desert as dusty as the dust she had tried to leave in the dust bowl called Kansas, to the town of Herlong an oasis only because there was a job and daycare. She went to work as a soda jerk by day and a scullery maid when she got home to the flat-topped duplex where she and Richard were housed, sweeping outside all the desert grit that had gotten in during the day, even from between the sheets.