hired girl

“I figured on getting back and getting the hired girl with the hearse, but he beat me,” the Big Hill undertaker said.

The bowling alley — originally owned by Bertha Truitt, who arrives unexpectedly in town “as though she’d dropped from the sky” — endures, as the decades pass and characters come and go: the kind doctor Leviticus Sprague, who instantly falls in love with Bertha; the lonely hired girl Margaret Vanetten, herself desperately looking for love; Cracker Graham, a pinsetter dazzled by the beauty of candlepin; Joe Wear, an orphaned teenager when he first discovers Bertha, an old man by the book’s poignant end.

Fuller treatments of religion in recent Y.A. have come in Julie Berry’s “The Passion of Dolssa” and Laura Amy Schlitz’s “The Hired Girl” — but both are historical fiction, set in bygone eras.

Then there’s a hired girl, the baby, the always absentminded and absent Mr. Goslar and the always nervous and irritable Mrs. Goslar, who’s expecting another baby.

The couple went on bicycle rides and for a time kept a hired girl.