Won't Be Long Now

by Elizabeth Hardinger

Genres: Coming of Age; World War II

Synopsis

Coming of age in 1950s Kansas, a misunderstood young woman must find her way through a society ill-equipped to give her grace in this powerful, exhilarating story about loyalty, family, and hard-won self-acceptance for readers of Jayne Anne Phillips, Patti Callahan Henry, and Donna Everhart.

Billie Enholm has never known quite how to define what makes her different from her schoolmates and her cousins, but there’s no denying that she is. Bright but awkward, gifted with numbers and words yet baffled by the ease with which others interact, Billie lives with a constant, nagging voice that insists she’s doing everything wrong. Even Billie’s mother, Dixie, describes her as an “odd-wad.”

When Billie’s father dies and Dixie retreats deeper into beer and apathy, Billie’s alienation grows. Summers spent at her grandparents’ house in small-town Wiley, eighty-some miles away, have always been a source of comfort—until rejection by her favorite cousin leaves her feeling even more alone. No one can fathom how Billie sees the world—the piercing moments of beauty and heartache she experiences, her uncompromising honesty and lack of guile. And while it feels as if everywhere else, the 1960s are ushering in a new era of protest and change, her own prospects remain stagnant.

Then tragedy engulfs the Enholm family, prompting revelations, questions, and a life-changing dilemma. Out of these unlikely circumstances comes a chance for forgiveness and understanding, and a way, at last, for Billie to reconcile her desire for love with her need for acceptance, just as she is. 

In a novel as emotional and nuanced as her acclaimed first novel, Elizabeth Hardinger gives readers a wholly original heroine whose journey is as unforgettable as it is ultimately uplifting.

Release date: April 28, 2026

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 304

Sample

Growing up, I was what the family called an odd-wad. Meaning, I had a hard time getting out of my head. I lived there most of the time, and I only visited the outside world when I had to. Short visits, because they usually hurt.

The first time I remember thinking for sure I was not like other people happened at the Kansas State Fair. It was held every year in Hutchinson, where Mother, Daddy, and I lived among a nest of little ranch houses on Halsey Drive. I’ve always heard that those houses had been built during the war to lodge the men training at the navy air base outside of town. Daddy’d bought the little house on the GI Bill with no down payment.

That day at the fair, Daddy was demonstrating WonderWare stainless, greaseless, waterless pans inside the Industrial Building, and I was standing on tiptoes watching. It was 1952; I was five years old. Sawdust rose everywhere, and I smelled straw, animal dirt, and caramelized sugar. It was hot, and there was a lot of noise, almost as if the sounds were a solid mass that pressed against my face. People walked by, and above my head they were talking, hollering, whistling. They were eating things on sticks, opening their mouths and snatching the food out of the air like birds. Babies were crying. Balloons popped. Through the giant doorways came carnival sounds—tinkly music, the scratchy voices of sideshow barkers, the grinding gears of the rides, the shouting, the screams.

It was a lot.

Behind Daddy was a stack of a couple dozen cardboard boxes. “WonderWare Waterless Miracle Cookware” in huge black letters. The table had a bright cloth tacked to the front and sides. The wooden top was scarred and discolored from long use.

Daddy was a scrawny, homely guy. His face was bony like the cow skulls you see in old-timey cowboy coloring books. The skin on his face was pocked, and his hair was buzzed close on the sides and back, slicked in front into a flattop. Mother cut his hair. I can’t tell you what color it was because I never saw it longer than a half an inch. Light-colored.

But the worst thing was his teeth. Crooked like he had gotten hit in the mouth with a bowling ball, and yellow from smoking—I used to scream/laugh every time he pretended to swallow a lit cigarette and make smoke come out his ears. You saw flashes of silver when he talked. He talked funny. He swallowed the beginnings of certain words with a gulp, not only when he was doing the pans but all the time.

Daddy was so homely and he struggled so hard to talk, it was a wonder how good a salesman he was. Maybe Mother was right—people bought his pans because they felt sorry for him. In my mind, he was just Daddy. His looks were normal, just like everything in my life was normal. Besides, with his job, he was home in the daytime sometimes, and he knew more songs and jokes and tricks than any other adult I knew. His whole face lit up when I laughed. He would sit and play jacks with me for as long as I wanted, ride me on his back, skip rope with me, play hopscotch with me on the street in front of our house, play tetherball with me in the school playground, pop popcorn and make purple Kool-Aid and pineapple upside-down cake. He was a great dad. He never wore out.

A knot of people had gathered around the table. Daddy talked and swallowed, talked and gulped, his hands never still. Waterless! he said, stretching it out. I seem to remember that he had a microphone on a stiff wire around his neck, but according to Mother he never did. Somehow he was loud enough for everybody to hear him, but they leaned in anyway. Waterless pans! Right here today! Folks (he gulped), you don’t have to drown your food before you cook it! He smiled, winked, ran his fingers along the rim of a frying pan like he was checking for nicks on a fruit jar. You don’t have to boil your chicken, your beef, your pork till it loses all that flavor you paid good money for! He pointed. No ma’am, nossir, you don’t have to lard it up neither! No fats, no oils, no shortening, no grease! He ran a middle finger over the cooking surface, snapped his finger, gulped. No greasy (he said “greezy”) feeling in your mouth, no grease on the tablecloth, no grease on the wall!

I was proud of having a famous Daddy.

Now he deftly produced a match, lit a flame on a portable gas burner, and placed the bare pan on the fire, all the while blathering about fried chicken. He told the joke about deviled eggs (I call them, gulp, fancy baby chickens). Then he placed his hand on the pan and jerked it back (owee! hot!), and I put my own fingers in my mouth.

Daddy reached under the table and pulled out a thick, dripping steak on a fork. He dropped the steak into the pan, and quickly he produced a damp white towel to wipe the table. The steak sizzled, and he forked it around, lifting it to show it wasn’t sticking. No grease! No water! Just look at that beautiful crispy! The meat snapped and smoked. At the perfect moment, he forked it out with one hand and lifted the pan with the other, holding it up like a mirror, turning it so everyone could see. Quickly he lowered the pan and dropped the raw side of the steak onto the hot surface. Stainless! Greaseless! Waterless!

A murmur passed through the crowd as the aroma of the meat filled the air. I felt light-headed. My toes curled.

Daddy slid the steak onto a bright white platter and pierced the meat, releasing a string of blood. Then he cut it, slice after slice, each as thin as a silver dollar. People oohed and aahed as he fanned out the slices, revealing the tantalizing red interior. A couple of men snorted.

You know the rest. He picked a few big men near the front and gave them each a slice on a toothpick, teasing them for a moment before he dropped it into their mouths. Tender? he said, as if their faces didn’t already show the answer. Then he grabbed the towel (ladies, this is the, gulp, best part) and wiped the pan to reveal the shiny silver finish. He lifted the pan over his head, turning it this way and that like a trophy. Meat’s tender, but boy, this pan is tough! Guaranteed! No questions! Any problem at all, you get a brand-new pan! For a lifetime!

Now I was startled to see Mother weaving through the crowd. She had a head scarf tight around her head, and her eyes were hidden behind giant sunglasses. She was wearing a threadbare wash dress and no lipstick.

Where had she been? Hadn’t she just been here, standing next to me? I looked down: a little semicircle of flattened lipsticked cigarettes. Where had she come from just now? What was she carrying?

“Mother!” I jumped up and down. “Daddy—”

Daddy shouted, pointing at Mother: “It’s one of ours, all right! A happy customer! Madame, come forward!”

“Madame”? I opened and closed my mouth. I looked around and saw a man glancing at me. I realized he had been sneaking looks at me for a while. I felt my stomach fold. My face felt as if someone had smeared it with the smell of wormy dirt. I didn’t know why.

Mother walked up to the table. I saw now that she was holding a dented pan.

Daddy grabbed it up. He made a joke about her clobbering “the old man.” He asked her name.

Mother turned red and lowered her eyes. “I dropped it down the basement stairs.”

I wanted to say But we don’t have a basement, but something told me not to. My tongue felt dry. I couldn’t stand it when things didn’t make sense, couldn’t stand it. As I’d grown, I’d noticed how my folks would say things that they knew perfectly well—and I knew perfectly well—did not add up. Little things, like telling me a TV show was over when it wasn’t, that we were out of cookies, that the store was closed, that if I closed my eyes it would soon be morning—and they were flat lying, something Mother spanked me for. My out-of-town cousins, too, loved lying to me, sending me hunting for left-handed monkey wrenches or making me kiss a rabbit’s foot to make the foot of the absent bunny grow back. Especially my cousin Joan, who loved to torment me.

Now I was baffled and enraged. Why was Mother saying we had a basement? Did she think I was stupid?

But the incident just went on, as if we actually had a basement, and my feelings made no difference. They never did. Why would they?

Daddy gulped. “Well, I’m afraid—I didn’t catch your name?”

“Mildred,” Mother said, as if her name actually was Mildred when in fact it was Dixie.

“Well, Mildred,” Daddy said, “I’m afraid (gulp) I’ll have to give you a brand-new pan!” He grabbed one of the boxes and handed it to her, and there was a murmur in the crowd as she took it and held it in front of her chest like a shield.

People turned to look at Daddy as he started winding up his pitch (nine ninety-five down (gulp), nine ninety-five a month), and pretty soon people lined up to sign the paperwork, and out of the corner of my eye I saw Mother standing off a ways in the wide doorway, smoking.

I felt tiny, impossibly tiny. It made no sense. It was like, did I even exist.

The vendors’ parking lot behind the 4-H building was a maze of thick, black electrical cords, and I stumbled over them as Mother dragged me to the round-shouldered green Nash.

She pressed the car door open, and, standing behind it, she smacked the backs of my bare legs with a hairbrush. She was gripping my wrist with her free hand as I tried to twist out of her reach. I was only prolonging things, but I couldn’t seem to help it.

I was angry, humiliated, and, at the same time, suspicious—she wasn’t hitting me as hard as she could. It stung all right, but it didn’t burn. This punishment was kind of a lie, just as surely as if she had said it in words and not actions.

She finally stopped and leaned on the car’s chrome door trim, resting her face on the back of her hand. She threw the hairbrush into the dim interior. Then she straightened and untied the scarf, freeing her luminous hair, which framed her face like a halo in the golden early evening. You could see the natural red streaks among the brown. She scrubbed her scalp with the fingertips of both hands.

Standing with her legs slightly apart, she gave me that look she had—that look, you know the one—the glare that somehow combined rage, revulsion, and indifference and portended unimaginable chastisements. I had learned (she had trained me) to dread that look. It seemed she knew just when to deploy it. It made me not only stop doing evil (or start doing the thing she wanted) but also shrivel into dust, into nothing. Just from the look.

“Stop crying,” she said. “Your dad will be here any minute.”

I’m not crying, I wanted to say—it was the truth—but that was talking back, and backtalk always got my face slapped, so I ducked my head and said it to myself. Why was she lying? When the truth was so obvious? It made no sense.

She bent and slapped the wrinkles out of the back of my skirt. “I told you to stand there and not say one word.” Her voice rose. “Didn’t I? Well, didn’t I?”

I tried to think back to when the two of us had first arrived, when Mother was standing next to me in the crowd, her hand on my shoulder. But with the noise and the smells and all those people, if she had said anything I didn’t remember it. Or it had just sounded like the usual behave yourself. I hadn’t noticed when she left. One moment she’d been there, and the next she was coming back, carrying the pan that supposedly had fallen down basement stairs we didn’t have.

“I hate the fair,” I said.

She frowned. “Don’t be ridiculous. We don’t hate anything.”

Now I heard Daddy whistling through his teeth like he always did, and then he was standing there, with the low sun behind him. He looked like a giant. His good shirt hung in the crook of his elbow, and he held three Pronto Pups between his fingers. In his other hand he was carrying three bottles—two beers and a grape pop. His face was shiny with sweat.

He tossed the corn dogs to Mother and bent over and scooped me up. He pressed a cold bottle against my neck, and I yelped. They both laughed.

I felt tears coming on, and I kicked his knees until he set me down.

“See what Mother did?” I raised my skirt and turned around. Three little welts were just visible on my legs. “Gave me a whippin’. With the hairbrush.”

Daddy’s smile faded. He put his hand on Mother’s arm. “How come?”

She frowned and pulled away. “You saw what she did in there. I told her—”

“Oh, Dixie. We’ve talked about this. They know.” He took her elbow. “They know the game. They don’t care. They want the folderol.”

I think Daddy knew it was easy to distract me with a new word. I couldn’t get enough words. “Folderol” wasn’t new, but it was one of his favorites. I loved that word. I loved the way my tongue felt when I pronounced the liquid l’s in the middle and again at the end. I loved that it started with f, like the naughtiest word I knew. “Falled-er-all.”

“They want to be, you know, seduced,” he went on.

Now the sting of the hairbrush and my reflection on “folderol” evaporated. Seduced, I whispered; not only a new word but also the key, I sensed, to understanding what was happening. It felt like a moment when anything was possible—maybe a moment when they would let me into their world, a world that was glimmering just on the threshold of my consciousness, a world I longed to be a part of, make sense of.

Seduced.

Mother pulled away and glared at him. “Little pitchers,” she said.

It was maddening, that phrase. I’d heard it a thousand times. I was not that little. I was not a pitcher.

The moment passed. But at least I had a new word, a new concept. Seduced, I repeated in my mind. Seduced, seduced, they want to be seduced. Even the word want in this context was intriguing.

Now Daddy reached under the front seat and pulled out a church key. He snapped open all three bottles and caught the caps on his forehead like a circus seal. He smiled with all his crooked teeth, tilted his bottle to his lips, and took three deep swallows as the caps cascaded off his face.

Mother laughed, and I saw the two of them exchange a radiant look. I felt a longing deeper and sadder than I could begin to comprehend.

“I hate the fair,” I said in my mind.

“Goodness gracious,” Mother said to me, laughing. “What a face! You better hope it doesn’t freeze that way.”

Another lie. She must think I’m stupid. She must think I like being laughed at.

I crawled inside my head, where there were soft, tender whispers and sinuous colors. Things made sense in my head, and it was where I felt I belonged.

My first friend was Harriet Easterday. We met in first grade when the alphabet had us sitting at adjacent desks. She was wearing a knife-pleated blue skirt and a white blouse with a Peter Pan collar. (No stiff net petticoat that flared out the skirt; they weren’t popular yet.) She had on Buster Brown penny loafers and white anklets. I was wearing a dress Mother had made. I loved that dress—it was white cotton with poodles on the full, stiff skirt—and I had insisted on wearing it. The bodice was tight, and the waist hit me just below my ribcage, and I felt my midsection pressing against resisting cloth all the way around. But I loved those preening, long-necked poodles. As for the tennis shoes I wore, the midsole trim was ragged where I had picked off bits of rubber; in places, it was only crumbs. No socks.

When it was her turn to introduce herself, Harriet told us she had moved to town that summer from Boulder, Colorado, which I heard as “Bolder” and was immediately enthralled. She had two brothers and a sister, all older. Her parents were professors. She liked to ski, snowshoe, sled, swim, ride horseback, snowball fight, fish, build snowmen, and roast hot dogs at a bonfire next to the pond after ice skating. Her favorite food was hot dogs, and her favorite color was red. As she talked I got excited like a puppy, and I did what I always did when that happened: I rested my hands on my lap and twiddled my thumbs, something I learned by watching my grandma. If she wasn’t crocheting or tatting or snapping beans, or reading her Bible or ladies’ devotional, Grandma twiddled her thumbs. She also had the habit, while sitting, of crossing her legs and shaking one leg. She also always saved a little piece of meat to eat with her dessert, and when she made a pitcher of Kool-Aid she added a can of frozen lemonade concentrate. These are a few of the many things I’d memorized about her. I know now that she loved me and I loved her—the simplest of feelings—but I had no language for it then and therefore no idea of what it was.

When it was my turn, I stood next to my desk and said a few words, but my voice was too loud, I could tell. I swallowed and cleared my throat. The other kids tittered. I started over, lowering the volume of my voice as Mother had taught me. I was born in Hutchinson, I announced, my father sold pans, my mother worked at Central Foods part time, I was an only child, my favorite thing was reading. I started to list the books I had read, and after the third one (Black Beauty), Mrs. Schreiber gently said, “Thank you, Billie. Debbie?” I thought I heard a little buzz drift among my classmates.

At lunch I was sitting alone, going over in my mind everything that had happened that morning, when Harriet sat down next to me. I glanced around. There were other vacant places.

“I love hamburger patties,” I said, and four or five kids looked up and stared. Too loud again. Harriet flinched the tiniest bit but covered it up by unfolding her paper napkin. She glanced at me and stuffed it into her collar.

We ate in silence for a minute. “What are your folks professors of?” I said.

“Dad teaches geology at Wichita U, and Mom teaches biological sciences at Juco.”

“It’s Wichita, not ‘Whichita.’” I noticed she called them Dad and Mom. Daddy had taught me to call my mother Mother, out of respect, and she had taught me to call him Daddy. “Dad” and “Mom” sounded foreign to me, a little palsy-walsy, modern. Exotic.

Harriet clanged her fork on the metal tray. “Don’t be mean. I can’t help it if I’m new.”

I got a lump in my throat. I couldn’t say “I’m sorry,” because what I’d said was true, not mean, but clearly—

“Anyhow,” she said, “where do people go to ski around here?”

I laughed.

“What’s funny?” She popped the round paper lid off her little bottle of milk.

“We don’t have any mountains. Just fields.”

She frowned. “That’s not funny.” She held the saltshaker over her milk and poured in at least a tablespoon.

“How come?”

She didn’t answer. I repeated it, thinking she hadn’t heard, but she busied herself with her food.

It went on like that. One moment I felt needed and useful, providing information about her new town, and the next, I was embarrassed but not sure why.

She finished first and left the table without a word. I sat for a while and fretted. What had I done wrong?

When I got to the playground, I waved to her, but she pretended not to see me. The swings were all taken, and the height of the slippery-slide scared me, so I leaned against a tree and ruminated. Other kids didn’t like me, I knew that already. I suspected that even my cousins, who had to like me because I was family, didn’t like me. I didn’t know why. I went over everything I had said to Harriet, and I didn’t understand why she seemed to distance herself, if that was what she was doing. It had to be something I said. I vowed not to say another word the rest of the day.

In the afternoon Mrs. Schreiber had each of us, one at a time, stand and read from the Dick and Jane reader, which was ridiculously simple and repetitive, and I quickly read through two pages, and she said, “Thank you, Billie” again, and had me sit down. My face burned. After everyone read, she divided us into two reading groups. Harriet and I, along with a handful of other kids, were in the Bluebirds group. Everybody else was in Redbirds. We all understood the significance of the labels, although Mrs. Schreiber acted as if our assignment was random. Another lie I didn’t understand.

Soon the Redbirds gathered in a circle in the back of the room next to the bookshelves and began working on flash cards while the Bluebirds sat at their desks and filled out spelling work sheets. I finished mine and sat with my hands folded on my desk. The air was hot and still in the little room. It felt as if there were a hundred people looking at me. I was exhausted.

I took refuge by closing my eyes and visualizing myself at home in our little house on Halsey Drive. In my mind Daddy was off selling pans or playing cards, and Mother was washing clothes and running the sweeper, filling the house with the smell of bluing and old dust. I watched as she collapsed into her chair and grabbed a cigarette as if she were drowning for the smoke. She lifted a can of beer to her mouth, and her throat bobbed as she drank it down like water. Over the course of a day the empties would line up on the coffee table, and the giant rainbow glass bowl with the frilly edges would fill up with cigarette butts. Sometimes she would fall asleep in her chair. Like any other kid, I assumed what went on at our house went on everywhere.

Meanwhile I saw myself play on the floor with my plastic animals—the galloping white horse, the grazing brown horse, the sleeping lamb, and the little man standing in the plastic puddle, holding a coiled rope—and the white plastic fences. I was probably too big to play with these things—so Mother said—but I still liked rearranging the fences, jumping the horses over them, and walking the man around, checking things out. I liked making up stories about the man and the animals and acting them out. The lamb, made of chalk, taken from the nativity set and out of scale with the others, just lay there and slept.

I liked it when Mother was dozing and the house was quiet. Sometimes I sneaked into the kitchen and stole a spoonful of brown sugar from the cupboard. Then I would wipe the spoon on my shirt and put it back in the drawer.

The next thing I knew, Harriet poked me in the side. I raised my head, blinking and headachy, just as Mrs. Schreiber arrived at her desk in the front of the room. The Redbirds were breaking up and returning to their seats.

I flashed Harriet a grateful look, and she smiled.

I was so relieved I felt about to burst. I was certain I would have gotten into trouble for falling asleep in class, and Mother and Daddy would have been called into school and told; but Harriet had saved me. Maybe she liked me after all. Tears were coming, and I pinched my nose to stop them, I gritted my teeth, I swallowed and swallowed. I had emotions beating on the inside of my body all over, scraping along the rawness, screaming to get out. This was nothing new, but it left me breathless nonetheless. My toes curled and uncurled inside my tennis shoes, rubbing against the sweaty foot sand. I sensed that crying in school would mark me among my peers. I would never be able to live it down. Nobody had told me that, but I knew it nonetheless.

Mrs. Schreiber looked down at her desk, gathering papers. “Bluebirds, hand your work sheets to the person in front of you.” By the time she looked up, I had wiped my nose on the back of my wrist and was ready to go read with the other Bluebirds.

A couple of weeks after school started, Harriet’s mother called my mother and invited me to come to their house after school on a Friday to play with Harriet. Their house was in Hyde Park, a leafy neighborhood in the northwest part of town full of huge old houses.

Harriet and I entered by the back door. Her mother sat at the kitchen table, grading papers. Her dishwater blond hair was pulled back in a ponytail, something I had never seen on a grown woman. All the women I knew kept their hair short and permed. Even Mother had had hers cut. She cut mine, too, in a little bowlish cut she called a “windblown”; she had gotten tired of wrestling with me to untangle it every time she washed it. She’d never known any girl who was so tender-headed.

“Oh, hello, girls,” Mrs. Easterday said, looking up. A stack of papers was at her elbow, along with a steaming cup of coffee. It smelled divine; there was no under-smell of burnt clay like we had at our house.

On the counter were two salad plates, each with a square piece of white cake and strawberries.

“This is Billie,” Harriet said.

Harriet’s mother stood up and straightened her skirt. “I’m happy to meet you, Billie.”

“Me too.”

She had us put our things on a polished bench in the living room and then seat ourselves at the long dining table to have our snack. It was quiet and cool in the living and dining rooms, and soft underfoot, with thick wall-to-wall carpeting. The heavy drapes cascaded to the floor in pretty curves. The house smelled like sweet wax. There were ashtrays set out, but you could tell only company smoked in the house.

Harriet’s mother carried in our plates and glasses of milk, for which I thanked her for the second or third time; I sounded oily to myself. My neck kinked in s. . .