“Where did the money come from?” A question never far from her mother’s lips and thus ingrained in the little curly-head’s bones but one she never thought to ask way back then on the special Sunday deli day.

They went together hand-in-hand, her daddy, handsome and solid, his short buzz cut black hair not even starting to gray and the chubby hazel-eyed child dressed in a red wool plaid jumper and gray knit blouse and Mary Janes, her Rosh Hashanah clothes just now the right length and finally, not too warm for this early winter day. On a Sunday morning, alone together, driving downtown in the black panel truck. Her sister was too little, her brother not yet a glimmer.

The little girl never got to ride up front except on those forays to the one Jewish deli in town, Ben Schwartz’ place. A tiny white ceramic tiled store in the cheap end of town, even further out of the mainstream than her parents’ business, which was a dry cleaning store already off the edge of respectability, a stone’s throw from the Faust Club, a block from the red-light district, betting parlors, and pawn shops. Ben Schwartz’ store flourished in what remained of the old small but thriving Orthodox community after the war, the merchants of this part of the city now died off or moved to the more desirable outskirts of town where the subdivisions were going up so fast you couldn’t keep track of their fanciful names.

But Ben remained in the old store and that’s where they drove every couple of months, early in the morning to gather up armloads of deli—delicious fresh dark rye bread, smelly black-edged cured white fish, oily orangey lox, fat crusty brown bagels, big white slabs of cream cheese cut from a huge block of the stuff, garlicky pickles, corned beef sliced so thin, pastrami, all imported from Chicago on the Union Pacific. This groaning board was packed in crisp shiny white paper and tied with thin white string, stuffed in brown paper bags, and carried triumphantly, with ceremony, the Jewish father bringing home the bacon.

The deli was clean and sharply aromatic, redolent of “the best food in town,” her father called it. There was sawdust on the floor because Ben was the town’s sole kosher butcher. He wore his white paper hat and on Sunday mornings, he had black help, the schvartzes, to pack up the food.

The floors and walls up to about four feet were white ceramic tile with black accents. You knew a place was old if it had black and white tile, new places had colored tile, blue and green and red and pink and black. Ben’s store held three or four round metal tables with spindly metal chairs. You could get a tea or coffee there and eat a deli sandwich or even breakfast, but this father and daughter never did because what was a bagel, lox, and cream cheese without a fat slice of red onion and a fatter slice of homegrown beefsteak tomato in your own castle?

Always on Sunday mornings there sat a few alter cockers, smearing rye bread with chrain or schmaltz or wolfing down a bagel overloaded with cream cheese and lox or drinking tea from a glass through a cube of sugar held between dingy broken front teeth. The little girl tried not to look at the old men’s teeth. These were grey men, intimidating, none too clean in body or clothing, wizened or agonizingly fat. Maybe they were refugees, or even veterans of the First World War, but did Jewish men serve in the war? Not her daddy, for certain. He was a father of two, a husband, and wore coke-bottle glasses, a little too old, 28, before the war even started. Besides, he was essential to the war effort, a chemist developing artificial rubber, plastics out of soybeans and guayule.

Here’s a puzzle, her mother’s baby brother, Uncle Henry, was a war hero and he was Jewish and he had a wife and child on the way and wore thick glasses. But he wasn’t essential to the war effort. He had no college degree, no alchemy in his brain. That was why they were in Peoria in the first place, to be where the soybeans grew. Far away from the rest of the family back east, far from the naysayers skeptical of his flamboyant plans for making his fortune—a dry cleaning store. Everybody needed dry cleaning, tailoring, zippers fixed. Even his skeptical wife, the practical one, the one who worried about money, thought the store was a grand idea and she pinned all her hopes for gaining entry into the merchant classes on the store—this is where she expended her energy, her ideals, her future.

What was left of the Orthodox community gathered at Schwartz’s Sunday mornings. The armloads of food were part of the ritual, her father’s opulent display for the old men and for Ben Schwartz and for the other customers who lined up at the glass-fronted display cases to fill their own arms with deli from Chicago.

The little girl was pleased by her father’s largesse, pleased by the safety of his presence. The old men may have looked at her but they daren’t say more than a few agreeable words, flanked as she was by her square father and the upright and pious Mr. Schwartz. They didn’t scare her.

And the rest of the day would probably go well too. Her mother would be sitting by the front door, on the porch if the day were warm enough, or even on the steps down to the sidewalk, eager to observe what daddy had brought. Then quickly inside to display the sumptuous provisions on favorite plates, bowls, platters to hold the last of the summer tomatoes. The best silver out for breakfast!

How did they decide that this was the week for deli? No money fights? This was a day her mother would never ask the question. No, not today. Today they’d all gather around the table and eat their fill and marvel over the variety of foods her father had picked out and weigh it unfavorably against the deli of their youths but secretly they knew they’d never had such a bountiful table in their own childhood homes. This was a meal of the wealthy.

Her daddy was expansive, happy, glad to have created an island of openhandedness in his own dining room and to know that his wife was happy too.

Amazingly, Mother was happy and had little to say beyond comparing today’s deli to the marvels of Boston Jewish food. Not only did she not have to cook but she hadn’t had to do the schlepping and the money did not come out of her purse. No, deli day was safe all around. The little girl was protected by the presence of this manna from heaven.