Chicken Every Sunday

It's the early twentieth century in the frontier town of Tuscon, Arizona. "Hefferan" is the name of several of the town's businesses, as diverse as the opera house, the creamy, the public transport, the laundry and the hotel among others, the Hefferan in question being James C. Hefferan. Emily Hefferan tells the story of what has so far been her twenty year marriage to Jim, which has produced three offspring, Rosemary, Ruthie and Oliver. Both Jim and Emily have strove for what they consider financial security in their marriage, each of their beliefs which is different from each other and more often than not in competition with each other. Jim, the bank's vice-president in title only, always has one business idea after another in making money and making Tuscon a place where he believes people truly want to live. He often sells his interest in a business in the need for money to invest in another. However, he has just as often lost the control of a businesses, in the process losing all the money he has sunk into it. Emily, however, considers that security being having a roof over their heads which they can call their own, which means being mortgage-free. As Jim's investments are never a guarantee, Emily, since day one of their marriage, has unilaterally made the decision to take in boarders, at times Emily and Jim having to give up their own bedroom to those boarders. Over time, Emily has gotten involved in the lives of those boarders, which includes shy and asthmatic Geoffrey Lawson, to who Rosemary is attracted, with she believing he not even noticing her. Jim and Emily's competing interests may come to a head with their already overcrowded house being even more overcrowded as Jim's latest venture, speculation in a copper mine, is built on a fragile house of cards, with any of those cards - which includes a wealthy spurned husband, his gold digger harlot of a wife, and an alcoholic mother-in-law - not being happy making the Hefferan house potentially come crashing down around them.