This revelation causes the narrator to return to the evening of her last dinner with her father's cousin. The daughter tells the narrator that Alfrida grudgingly admired the narrator's writing, although Alfrida thought that the narrator wasn't as smart as she thought she was. She receives no more information about Alfrida until Alfrida's illegitimate daughter appears at the funeral of the narrator's father. Later in life, the narrator transforms this incident into a short story that offends the elderly Alfrida. She had wanted to see her mother but was denied by relatives Alfrida responded by saying that her mother would have wanted to see her if their places were reversed. Alfrida recalls how her mother died of severe burns caused by an exploding lamp. The dinner, however, does make one lasting impression. The narrator's only visit to Alfrida is marked by the narrator's condescension toward Alfrida's poverty and lack of cultivation. Once the narrator attends college, however, she distances herself from Alfrida and avoids her frequent dinner invitations. Alfrida seems urbane and sophisticated to the young narrator, who views her with admiration. "Family Furnishings": The narrator reminisces about Alfrida, her father's nonconformist cousin who worked as an advice columnist in the city.This small act of retaliation against Neal rejuvenates Jinny, who now feels able to face the possibility of her survival. Jinny allows him to drive her away into the fields, where they kiss on a floating bridge. Eventually, the foster parents' teenage son Ricky approaches Jinny in the car. She thinks over what she learned from the doctor: her cancer, which she had assumed to be fatal, is receding. Jinny refuses to leave the car when they arrive at the foster parents' trailer home, but Neal decides to join them for a meal. He insists that they pick up Helen's shoes from the home of her foster parents even though Jinny wants to return home immediately. Instead, Neal flirts with Helen, the young woman whom they have hired to help around the house while Jinny undergoes chemotherapy. She has received startling news, but her husband does not appear concerned. "Floating Bridge": Jinny, a middle-aged woman with cancer, travels with her husband Neal from a medical appointment.She is confused by the consequences of her hoax, but soon focuses once more on her desire to escape her parents' lifestyle and show everyone who she really is.
Several years later, Edith learns that Ken and Johanna have married and had a child. Ken, impressed by Johanna's resolve and by her savings, does not question her decisions. Having realized that Ken cannot control his own life, Johanna takes charge and arranges for them to start a new life. She discovers that Ken has fallen ill, and, lovingly, she nurses him back to health. Johanna, convinced by the letters that Ken will marry her, uses her substantial savings to travel to his remote location in rural Canada. Edith devises a hoax in which she and Sabitha forge love letters from Sabitha's father to Johanna. Sabitha is friends with Edith, a shoe repairman's daughter who feels bored with her constricting blue-collar lifestyle. Sabitha's mother is dead, and her father, Ken Boudreau, lives elsewhere in poverty, frequently pleading with his father-in-law for money. "Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage": In southwestern Ontario, Canada, Johanna, a plain, poor, unmarried woman, works as a housekeeper for Mr.
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