Pittsburgh, PA. 1941. The world is plunging headlong into WWII, and Flossie's beau has been drafted. He wants to get engaged, and she reluctantly agrees. But when he's away at Pearl Harbor, she falls in love with another man. If she only had a mother to advise her! All Flossie has to go on is a fading photo of a young woman in profile and a name: Florence, like her own.

Mahaffey, PA, 1910: Talented, beautiful and flirtatious, Florence wants to be a concert pianist, and she can't help attracting men. But a shadow falls across her young life, its first sign a seemingly innocuous cough. Her search for health takes her and the reader across the panorama of a vanished America, and eventually to a marriage she never dreamed of...