A mentally-handicapped girl named Elizabeth disappears from her close-knit Detroit neighborhood, igniting the plot of Lori Roy’s Until She Comes Home.

The neighborhood is anchored by two institutions: the factory where all the men work, and the church where all the women stage bake sales and thrift drives. Don’t forget the growing racial tensions from the “coloreds” who live in the apartment building up the street. That should clue you in to the era.

With Elizabeth nowhere in sight, the men sketch a map of the neighborhood on the back of an envelope, then fan out into assigned search areas. The women keep a pot of coffee hot in the church basement. They bake endless loaves of banana bread and carrot cake, lay out stacks of sandwiches, all to feed the men when they circle back to home base, famished and baffled.

Roy’s story focuses on three women, Malina, Grace and Julia.

Malina’s husband continually comes home late, and she’s pretty sure the prostitutes who loiter near the factory every payday have caught his eye. In fact, she’s convinced it’s a particular prostitute, the one who pushes a baby carriage. Malina just knows the baby in that carriage is a creamy brown color, and she is unhinged enough to do something about it.

Grace is a delicate blonde jewel of a woman, but heavily pregnant at the moment. She is the sort that inspires protectiveness in men, and she just might need it. Also, for some reason I missed, she wants more than anything to perfect her pierogis.

Julia wishes she was pregnant, but for now she pulls her loosest cardigan around her plump body (and it still doesn’t fit) and lavishes her maternal instincts on to two twin nieces who . . .

Are instructed to stay inside, behind locked doors, while Uncle Bill searches for the lost girl and Aunt Julia serves up sandwiches at the church. Do you think these girls will be content to stay home and look out the window?

Several Amazon reviewers agreed that Until She Comes Home is hard to follow. I managed to keep up, even if I missed a few sideways events.

Malina’s storyline is the limp lettuce in this story sandwich. Her first jealous-wife deed makes sense. After that, Roy can’t decide whether to make Malina the crazy neighbor, or the queen bee of the church basement.

Though hard to read about women who had little to do but scrub their baseboards and try those pierogis one more time, I liked the portrait of neighborly life. I liked seeing a Detroit that was once vibrant.

 

Photo via Visual hunt and Canva