Dayton's used to be like one big family. Its patriarchs even provided a nurse for sick employees, but now each worker is merely a number. No wonder Noelle Nichols of Women's Shoes and the others sneak away to find solace-or a drink or a tryst-in an abandoned infirmary so hidden the floor has no button in the store's elevator.

The discovery of a painting of a store nurse who worked there in the 1940s threatens to expose secrets and change lives forever as the business inches toward demise.

Daisy Sale Forever roams widely across the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul through the turn of the millennium.