Excerpt from The Dime Museum by Joyce Hinnefeld, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The Dime Museum

Chicago, 1965

Tom, Maude's make-believe grandson, has called to tell her he's enlisted. (Something she already knows.) He'll join the Army before they can draft him, he says. See a bit of the world, maybe come out with more on the other side. If he comes out the other side. And both of them laugh. Maude says she wouldn't know which would be better— his coming out the other side or his not coming out the other side. She's thinking, though, why not the shortest run you could make of it? Or why not a straight path up through Michigan, across the border to the other side? That's what she would have expected of poor, bedeviled young Tom, their little Tommy, nineteen years old and living God knows where, maybe on the streets, and smoking so much he coughs like a man three times his age.

He wants to come see her, he says, to hear some of the old stories. I want you to tell me more, Non, he's said to her. Non short for Nonny, what he called her from the time he could talk. She told him some stories in the past, mostly that time they traveled together by train, from Chicago to Philadelphia. She's told him some stories and she could tell him more, many more, but she isn't sure he'd want to hear them. Like how they came to spend that summer week, when he was a boy, with a rich and drunken madwoman (or so Annie's children and stepchildren had seen her, as a drunk and a madwoman who needed tethering). How she, Maude, and young Tom had been summarily dismissed from the fancy old hotel in Cape May. It hadn't just been time to start the next part of that trip. Despite what she'd told him.

Well, she might tell him another tale or two now. Sing some of the old songs with him. "Knees Up Mother Brown," "Burlington Bertie," "When the Right Girl Comes Along" and—this would be a good one now—"Oh! It's a Lovely War." She'd liked that one especially, how you could sing one thing and mean another. That was the first massive war of her lifetime, a ridiculous one but maybe not as ridiculous as this new one in Asia. Who can say? The men in charge claim to know what they're doing, but then that's always been the case. Over and over, they're proved wrong but who even notices? The poets maybe. But who listens to them anymore?

Young Tom will want to hear his favorite tune from the time he was a baby. After the ball is over, Maude remembers crooning to him. After the break of morn. She sang better when she used to rock him to sleep than she'd ever done on a stage. She remembers her old rooms on North Clark Street, late morning light pouring through the filmy curtains, rousing dust from the clutter. The tea set she'd once shared with Annie—a gift to them, from the owner of the Gem, at their so-called wedding fifty years ago. Her threadbare blankets and quilts. Her books in neat stacks on a shelf below the window. Outside, people honking their auto horns and shouting.

From her chair, rocking the weepy boy on her knee, she could see the Checker cabs backed up below her second-floor window, waiting to make the turn onto the avenue. Her window would have been open, even in the dead of winter. Year-round there was a cold wind from the lake. It ruffled the curtains and gave the room a chill. She might have closed the window, shut out the cold and the automobile exhaust, but she had read that the cool air was good for a baby's sleep.

Everything she knew she'd read somewhere—in a book from the library, or a newspaper or magazine. Maybe, she sometimes thinks, this was her problem. But it was a kind of miracle too, wasn't it? How she'd come to know what she knew. To work where she'd worked. To have helped raise this boy—now a man, now ready to do what they all seemed bent on doing, to be a soldier, go to war. No talking him out of it, Prue has said. His other make-believe granny. Prue short for Prudence, her full given name, which she hated. Though it suited her, Maude had told her many times, because she was always the prudent one. And it's a good thing one of us was, Prue liked to say, though it wasn't exactly prudence that had gotten the two of them—first Maude, then Prue—the job that had kept their little makeshift family afloat.

Excerpted from The Dime Museum by Joyce Hinnefeld. Copyright © 2025 by Joyce Hinnefeld. Excerpted by permission of Unbridled Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.