"Welcome to Florabama, Alabama. Off the main highway and down the dirt roads, small plots of cotton and soy flank brighter crops of jonquil and daffodil. You can sip a Co'cola or iced tea and think about money and love. Money and love. If you had 'em, you were free to think about other things. If you didn't, you couldn't think about anything else. And the latter couldn't be more true for Hilly Pruitt.".

""We've been screwed blue and tattooed," quips Holly upon hearing the news of the closing of Cherished Lady, the local lingerie factory. Hilly, along with many other women in Florabama, has been relying on the factory for her livelihood for years. As Hilly always says, "Life is like a dogsled: if you ain't the lead dog, the scenery never changes."".

"The same day the plant closes, Bonnie Duke Cullman begins her drive through a Gulf Coast storm to the first real job of her life. Her children are in college and her country club and charity committee existence has come to an end as abruptly as her marriage. In short, like the women of Cherished Lady, she's been downsized.

But luckily for Bonnie, she does have a job to go to: she's been hired to run the Displaced Homemakers Program for a podunk community college where the ex-bra seamstresses of Cherished Lady await her wisdom."--BOOK JACKET.