Over the course of the year, the family resumed its routines, Helga a noted absence at family gatherings. Victory and Jedd came up to visit her parents during the holidays, bringing along their two little ladies, Sunny wearing out Dixie with her endless energy and Dinah charming her grandfather with her quiet grace. Dixie could not resist chiding Sunny on her size, remarking on how a lady needs to watch her figure and how pretty she would be if she were less chubby. These remarks did not fall on deaf ears, for Sunny was acutely aware she was fat, but they had a reverse effect on the child, making her want to bury herself even more in food to escape Dixie's criticism, and Sunny snuck treats from the corner store when she and Dinah roamed the neighborhood exploring.
Victory spoke proudly to her father of the hardware store that she was planning to open that year with the help of Jedd's father, which Jacob listened to absently, making mental notes as to how he would do things differently as she pointed out different aspects of the business. Jacob did not approve of Victory opening what he considered to be a man's business, and he questioned Jedd's advice in the matter. Jacob felt Jedd was a kind man, but somewhat stupid, still associating his very deep, clipped, slow southern speech with a lack of wit and business sense. The year turned uneventfully under a soft, numbing blanket of thick snow.
Secretly sneaking candy on bottle refund runs, Sunny continued to grow obesely, with a cute face, but a rotund body. She didn't understand her mind wanted her to remain a chubby baby, in hopes one day her emotionally absent mother would once again cradle her in her arms and rock her to sleep. She had no concept she was also shielding herself from the bombs exploding in her dreams, vivid from televised reports of the budding Korean war. All she knew was she had this inordinate craving for sugar, and indulged it at every opportunity. Sour sweet tarts burned ulcers in the sides of her tongue while sticky sweet sugar mamas rolled in caramelly saliva and jawbreakers sweetly tumbled through their colors. Three musketeers became the flavor of the day for a few weeks and Sunny ran around, her breath a constant breeze of chocolate. Then candy jewelry graced her fair, freckled skin, sticky from being progressively chewed to the white stretchy elastic that strung the treats. Red hots, Reese cups, slo pokes, goetze's caramels, whoppers, sixlets, tootsie rolls and tootsie pops, Hershey bars, mars bars, zagnut, zero bars, baby ruths, ecco wafers, candy cigarettes, double bubble bubble gum, wax bottles with tooth aching syrup, root beer barrels, pez, bazooka joe bubble gum, jolly ranchers, pixie sticks leaving sugary trails on her face, $100,000 bars, wax lips, wax harmonicas... the list was endless and the opportunities limitless and hundreds of pounds of chocolate and sugar poured annually into Sunny's growing tummy.
It wasn't long before Sunny began a life-long relationship with the dentist, her teeth caving in to the onslaught of sugar, and Sunny sneaking surriptuous peeks down the dental hygienist's loose blouse as her molars were being drilled, enjoying the soft curves and fluid movement of the woman's breasts. It never occurred to her that her interest in this was a bit unusual for a girl, and the hygienist never caught on to her observances.
In the outside world, troops were flying in hundreds to Korea, to help save the free world from the threat of Communism. In the world within the Johnson home, Jedd was facing a dilemma of his own, how to save his job from the threat of unions. While not a steel worker himself, his job was seriously impacted by the nationwide strike, for without steel, it was purposeless to create machines. Daily he went to work uncertain whether there would be work to go to, and daily went home to pore through the paper searching for positive news. Living with the axe hanging over his back, Jedd began to feel the stress of being a family man, and he and Victory realized her hardware store dream may well become their entire income.
Victory abandoned the now wilting garden for her latest distraction of saving every penny - going to an extreme in never throwing anything remotely useful out and purchasing meat a tad beyond its proper age. One evening, eating a meal of buttermilk, wilted spinach salad with blue cheese dressing, and "aged beef" wrapped in Swiss cheese with sourdough rolls, Jedd, a smirk dimpling the corners of his mouth, remarked, "How I love the flavor of rotten food!" sending Victory into a giggling fit and the two toasted to their thrift. The girls did not agree with their parents' thrift, consulting each other in the telepathy of children when confronted with meals that were slightly less than fresh, slipping the meat under the table to the cat, who usually left it dry and curling up on the floor, and wrapping limp vegetables in their napkins to dispose of later. Victory held regular yard sales of her collection of things, eking a few dollars toward the savings every month, aptly demonstrating the principle one man's trash is another man's treasure, then saving up for another month to repeat the process. Jedd endured this, sharing the same dream with her to save enough to open their own store. So they gagged down dubious meat and wilted vegetables surrounded by piles of newspapers, tin pans and bottles, saved and prayed and waited. The concept of Victory working to help achieve this goal never crossed their minds.
Eventually, they succeeded, and opened that fall, celebrating their grand opening with the Mayor holding a ribbon cutting and Sunny gleefully wielding the cardboard scissors, nearly as long as she was tall. The little family stiffly smiled, squinting in the sun, for their photo for the town paper, and found themselves front page news the next day to their delight. Jedd carefully cut out the article and framed it, hanging it over the checkout counter in the store along with their first dollar, from a purchase of a box of nails from Helga, who wrote and sent the dollar and wished Jedd to send them to Cobb, who was still ranting in the hospital over his need for nails to build his houses. Cobb wasn't considered dangerous, being allowed to do basic carpentry to help occupy his mind, building birdhouses he sent to every member of the family, wildly decorated in a mismatch of colors, which he explained in his letters was camouflage to help protect the birds from alien invasions. Helga still had not contacted Dixie or Jacob, but kept in touch with her sister-in-law, with whom she exchanged long letters as to their fears and hopes for their troubled Cobb.
While the Johnson's house piled up in colorful disarray, Victory's hardware store grew in neatly catalogued rows of the very same machine parts Jedd tooled. Finally coercing her father to come down and see it, Victory polished every shelf, shining every part, and waited at the door for Jacob to walk in and be astounded. He walked in. Took one look around and began to criticize her. Years of running a grocery had fixed Jacob's mind as to how to run a retail business, and he expounded at length on her foolishness in stocking the older, out of date and thus in his mind, "perishable" harder to find and less needed parts, her stupidity in keeping accounts for customers, recalling his own losses and forgetting the payment of those debts were what got him back on his feet. He chided her for having nothing of interest to women in the store, overlooking the rows of sewing machine and vacuum supplies, and berated her for leaving oil or grease on her inventory, ignorant this was how the metal was protected from decay. His final blow was to say the store smelled bad, that something had to be done about the overwhelming aroma of iron and oil and leather.
Jedd, who had been silently standing behind Victory, who with clenched fists stuck stiffly down her sides was stubbornly battling back tears during this outburst, stepped forward.
"Ah believe, sir, it is time now for you to go," Jedd took Jacob's arm firmly in his strong grip and walked him to the door while he took an interminable length of time to speak that one sentence. He followed it with "You are welcome to visit the children, but you are no longer welcome to visit my establishment," probably the longest single string of words Jedd had ever oozed through his teeth in his life. Jacob stood and stared, opened his mouth, closed it, then turned with his mouth firmly clamped shut, got in his car and drove back to Ohio, going the wrong way down the one way street in a puffed up wake of red clay dust.