'Mother Hubbard fraud,' Lola Faye repeated. 'That's what cops call it when wives steal from the money their husbands give them to buy groceries and stuff like that.'
I unconsciously glanced toward the man behind the fern and was seized by an urgent need to defend my mother. 'I wouldn't call what my mother did stealing,' I said.
Lola Faye considered this. 'No, I wouldn't either,' she said. 'Not exactly, anyway.' She peered out toward the lobby of the hotel, increasingly unpopulated now, a room filled mostly with empty chairs. 'Ollie always called it getaway money because the women who did it, who took money like that, Ollie said they were planning to use it to get away.'
'Get away from what?' I asked.
'From their husbands,' Lola Faye answered. 'From their families. From their whole lives.'