Patricia Summary

Patricia Best's father, Roger, has a lot of ideas for businesses but Patricia notes that his ideas are often little more than pipe dreams. Patricia, a teacher, is an avid genealogist with notebooks notes on all the major families of the town. She has a list of those who first arrived to settle Ruby. She says the group picked up several orphans, teenagers who had joined the group, and that they'd picked up a couple of babies that were in intolerable circumstances. After the group completed its journey, they were no longer a bunch of families but a cohesive group with a common goal and common memories of "the enormity of what happened to them." She goes on to say that their hatred of whites was "convulsive but abstract."

Patricia says that K.D. and Arnette, married the previous spring, are now expecting...