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PREFACE 

Sam McGinty pressed her cheek against the cold window and exhaled slowly to cloud the glass. She glanced at the back of her father’s head in the front seat before lifting her finger to write in big block letters: LUCKY.

Every Saturday, for as long as she could remember, her father had spritzed the windows of his car with a mix of vinegar and water and wiped them clean with pages of the previous week’s Erietown Times. When she was little, in the coldest months of northeast Ohio she would breathe on her backseat window and draw messages for her dad. A smiley face, maybe, or a star with sticks exploding from its five tips. Her father never said a word about them, but she was sure he saw them.

After that awful day in the summer of ’69, when she was twelve, everything changed. Her father stopped cleaning the car windows every weekend and sometimes went as long as two weeks without washing his Chevy in the driveway. It was too warm for window notes, which made it easier for Sam because it didn’t feel right to do anything nice for her father anyway.

Then autumn came, frosting car windows every night. One morning before dawn, Sam slipped out the back door before her father left for work and left a message on her car window -- SAD, inside a heart – and ran back into her bedroom. 

Her father didn’t even bother to knock before storming into her room just minutes later. “Stop leaving your fingerprints all over the car window, Sam,” he said. “You’re too old for that shit.”

He was standing at the foot of her bed, a dark silhouette against the window as he jingled the coins in his pocket, which Sam knew to be the soundtrack of his rising discontent. “Dad,” she said, about to apologize, but then her mother appeared in the doorway and turned on the light. In unison, father and daughter looked at her and said, “Are you all right?” 

Ellie stood there, staring at Brick. “Let’s go downstairs,” he said.

Sam slipped out of bed and stood in her doorway as her father, towering over her tiny mother, walked Ellie down the stairs.  “What did Sam draw on the window?” she heard her mother say.

“Nothing,” Brick said. “Just fingerprints.”

Sam never drew on her father’s car window again. Until today.

He would understand why.

She shifted in her seat and hugged the train case on her lap, curling her fingers around its handle. She squeezed her eyes shut and whispered in the dark, “I am going to college.”

Her mother’s beehive bobbed slightly over the top of the seat in front of her. “What’s that, Sam?”

“Nothing,” Sam said, bolting upright.

She shoved the shoeless feet of her sleeping brother away from her hip and peered out her window. The sun wouldn’t rise for another hour, but life was stirring in this rural patch of Ohio. Kitchen windows were aglow, bracketing lives like the frames of a movie reel. A man in a barn coat reached for his hat on a hook. Three frames later, another man opened a door and a small dog slipped out and quickly squat. A woman lifted a coffee mug and in the very next frame another woman poured coffee into a raised cup. The early hours have an easy rhythm no matter where you are. It’s the rest of life that gets away from you.

Sam shook her head in silent reprimand. Not today. I’m going to college.

Her brother stirred in his sleep and rammed his feet into her hip again. She reached down to grab the top of first one sock, and then the other, pulling them higher over his boney ankles before easing his feet away. Reilly groaned and curled up like a cat resisting a nudge. “Reill could sleep through a tornado,” Sam said.

“Let him be, Sam,” her mother said. “He got out of bed at four-thirty for you. That’s mighty early for an eleven-year-old boy. On a Saturday, no less.”

Sam rolled her eyes. God, the unearned dispensation her mother granted the males in this family. She raised her left wrist and tipped the face of her Timex into the lingering moonlight. Not even six yet. “Why’d we have to leave so early?” she said. “It’s only an hour-and-a-half away, and I can’t even pick up the key to my dorm room until nine.”

“Your father wanted to make sure we had plenty of time to get there and find the place,” Ellie said. “We’ve never done this before.  We’re all doing this for you, Sam.”

“Ellie,” her father said.

“Well, we are, Brick. This is new for all of us.”

Sam’s father glanced at her in the rear view mirror. “I always leave early, Sam. You know that. That way, if you get a flat tire or have to wait for a train, you’re still on time for work.”

Sam pressed her back against the seat. “Mom, I appreciate everything you and Dad are doing.”

Her father smiled in the mirror. “Nobody said you didn’t.”

Really, Mom, Sam thought, but she didn’t say anything. She touched the back of her mother’s seat and mouthed, I get it. I’m going to miss you, too.

She ran her fingers along the stitching on the lid of the train case. For all of Sam’s life, the powder-blue leather case had sat on the shelf in her parents’ bedroom closet, loosely covered in faded gold tissue paper. Sam and Reilly were not allowed to touch the case, let alone play with it.

Two nights ago, her mother called Sam into the bedroom and patted the spot next to her on the bed. She reached for the train case sitting on the other side of her and placed it on the bed between them.

“You remember Aunt Nessa,” she said.

“She was a teacher, and she was really nice. She saved her prettiest Christmas cards for me. The ones with glitter or that velvety snow stuff. So that I could cut them up and make new cards.”

Ellie nodded. “She saw arly talent in you, the way you liked to draw. She wanted to encourage you to be an artist.”

Sam shrugged. “Guess I would have disappointed her on that score.”

Her mother sighed. “Aunt Nessa sometimes overestimated the ones she loved.”

“There are worse habits to have.”

“That’s right,” her mother said. “But it can get your hopes up.”

Sam ran her hand across the smooth leather. “So, Aunt Nessa gave you this?”

Ellie nodded. “She took me to Higbee’s Department Store in downtown Cleveland to buy it, a couple of months before I graduated from high school. We shopped in the personal leather goods department, and then had lunch at the Silver Grille. It was a famous restaurant there.”

Sam pulled the case onto her lap and threw back her hands at the force of the metal latches springing open. “It feels so new,” she said, opening the case. She leaned in and sniffed the silky gray lining. “Smells new, too.”

Her mother said nothing.

Sam tilted the case back to see herself in the mirror inside the lid.  A diamond of ruffled elastic framed her face. “I’ve never seen a mirror in a suitcase before.”

“To check your makeup,” Ellie said. She leaned in to peer at Sam’s reflection. “To make sure you look your best before you get off the train.” She pushed back a strand of hair from Sam’s face. “Or off the plane now, I guess.” Ellie dropped her hand into her lap. “So many people flying now.”

Sam closed the lid and pressed down the latches. “How come you never used it, Mom?”

“I did, once, when your father and I -- .” She stood up. “I stayed home. Never needed it.” She slid her hands down the sides of her hips and smoothed the pockets of her capri pants. “Anyway, it’s yours now,” she said, walking toward the doorway. “For this big adventure of your life.”

Sam spent the rest of that day figuring out what to pack in the train case. “The must-haves,” her mother had said, “the things you don’t want to be without.”

Things you don’t want to leave behind, too, Sam had decided.

She cupped the latches with her hands to muffle the sound as she opened the lid and started pulling out one item at a time and setting it next to her brother’s feet: A comb and hairbrush, a small box of tampons, two plastic eggs of L’eggs sheer-toe pantyhose, a new tube of Maybelline Great Lash Mascara and a half-empty bottle of Love’s pink Baby Soft. She smiled at the small sewing kit, a gift from her former 4-H adviser, Mrs. Sandstrom. Mrs. Sand Storm, they used to call her, because she got so worked up whenever the girls failed to take seriously their “marital futures.”

“Our future as domestic slaves, she means,” Val Murphy said to Sam during a tutorial on how to make pincushions. Sam had laughed at the time, but now the memory made her sad. Val’s baby was almost six months old already. Before she got pregnant, she and Sam had dreamed of going together to Smith College, just like Gloria Steinem had. Val’s father owned four car lots and could afford to send her anywhere she wanted to go. Val’s dream died the day her parents said they’d disown her if she went to Cleveland and got an abortion.

“It’s over for me,” Val told Sam through tears after she’d dropped out of high school. “But you, Sam? You could still apply to Smith. Remember what Mrs. Sand Storm’s husband told you at the state fair booth. “They’ve got scholarships for girls like you.”

“He was making a point about my lack of sewing skills.”

Val shook her head. “He was also right. Which is why you’ve got to write that essay.
Go for both of us, Sam. Please.”

Val wouldn’t let up on her, badgering her to fill out the application and even editing her essay. To Sam’s shock, Smith College offered her a full ride.

Her father killed the deal. “You know what this is,” he said, waving the admission letter.  “Charity. Pure and simple. They feel sorry for you.”

“It’s a full scholarship, Dad. They said they liked my essay. They said I had great potential.”

“That’s rich people talk for pity. What they mean is they’ll get to show you off like a prized monkey.”

Sam squeezed her eyes shut, willing herself not to cry. “But it’s free, Dad. It’s where I want to go.”

“Sam, nothing worth having is free. They’ll own you for the rest of your life. No matter what you accomplish, it will never feel like you did it on your own because you owe that school something you can’t ever pay back.”

“We’ll owe money if I go to Kent State,” Sam said. “You wouldn’t even let me apply for a federal grant.”

“And what did you learn after you went behind my back and did it anyway?”

She shrugged.

“Answer me. What did they tell you?”

“I didn’t qualify,” Sam said softly.

Brick shook his head. “That’s right. You didn’t qualify because I make too much money. Your old man may work in maintenance at Erietown Electric, but I still make too much money for you to go to college for free. That’s who you come from. Don’t you ever forget that.”

“We’ll still have the student loan.”

“That we’ll pay back, with interest,” he said. “That’s how it works.”

Sam gave it one last try. “They killed hour students there.”

Brick shrugged. “That was five years ago, and they haven’t killed one since. You’ll be fine.” He walked over to her and squeezed her shoulder. “Don’t worry, kid. Kent State is a great college, with no strings attached. That’s why your mother got her job, so we could afford this.”

Until then, Sam’s mother had been sitting silently on the sofa. Ellie cleared her throat and said, “That’s not why -- .” She waved her hand and stood up. “Never mind.”

That was the end of it. The next morning Sam stepped on the lever to open the flip-top of the kitchen trash can and saw Smith’s acceptance letter crumpled and covered in bacon grease.

“The end of a dream,” she told her only other close friend, Lenny Kleshinski, that evening, her eyes red and swollen. “So much for us being just a train ride apart.”

Sam and Lenny had known each other since kindergarten, when his large family moved two houses down. They became best friends the day Sam decided he was the only friend her father would never ban on a whim because his dad was a union brother at Erietown Electric.

For years, Lenny and Sam talked about going to the same college. Now she was headed for Kent, and Lenny was already at Boston College. “Home of the Kennedys,” Brick said, pointing to the framed picture of the president hanging next to one of Christ on the Jack-and-Jesus wall in the living room. “Good for Lenny.”

“The Kennedys lived in Boston, Dad. They went to Harvard. I read about it in the Rose Kennedy book you gave me last year for Christmas.”

Her father shook his head. “The point, Sam, is that you’ll sprout where you’re a seed, like your mother always says.”

Sam groaned. “Bloom where you are planted, you mean.”

Her father smiled. “See? You don’t need Harvard.”

The night before Lenny left for Boston, he gave Sam a pad of lined stationery and a six-pack of Bic pens. “It doesn’t matter that we’re going to be far apart, Sam. That’s what mail is for.”

“It’s not the same.”

“Listen to you. Everyone knows I’m just going to be a lawyer someday, writing wills for old people in Erietown. You’re the one who’s going to be the famous educator. The crusader for children. Breaking all the old rules. Helping more kids like us go to college. I’m going to save all of your letters and be able to tell everyone, ‘See? I knew her when.’”

Lenny. Sam set the pad of paper on the seat, marveling at this flurry of memories. Maybe leaving home was like what they say about dying, with snapshots of your life flashing before you. 

The sky was growing lighter, making it easier to see what remained in her train case. She lifted the small bundle of new underpants, a gift from her mother’s best friend Mardee. She set them aside and unrolled the picture Reilly had drawn for her. “To hang on your wall,” he told her last night. “So you won’t forget me.” Reilly had depicted himself as a head taller than Sam, with his arm wrapped around her shoulders. “Nice try, shrimp,” she said, pointing to his self-portrait as they sat on the edge of her bed. He laughed and bumped against her. “I will be bigger than you by the time you come home.” She fluffed his bushy red hair and kissed his cheek. “I’ll be home for Thanksgiving, you boob.”

“Thank you, God,” she whispered as she rolled up Reilly’s drawing and set it next to her on the car seat. “Thank you for helping me protect Reilly from the worst of it.”

The newspaper clipping and drawing lined the bottom of the train case. She couldn’t part with them, and she sure didn’t want her mother to know she had them. For six years, Sam had held up her end of the unspoken agreement with her parents: That day had never happened to them, even though it had changed all of them.

She piled everything back into the case and closed the lid.

 

CHAPTER 1

Ada Fetters walked to the kitchen table and set down her laundry basket with the sigh of an expired hope. The morning’s conversation with her youngest son grew heavier with each passing hour. I raised that boy to be better than this. I raised him, and I failed.

She walked to the open window over the sink and searched for her husband. Wayne was stepping off the tractor, and she could hear him whistling for Sheba. The dog ran to Wayne’s side and leapt for the last piece of beef jerky in his hand. Wayne rubbed the dog’s head, and both of them turned toward the house with the red sun behind them, two shadows walking into bad news.

Ada went over to the stove and flipped the chicken pieces sizzling in the skillet, scraping bits of char from the sides. This one pan had helped her raise four kids. She had cooked with it every day for more than 40 years, and brandished it countless times to bring a shaky peace to the Fetters household.

Larry was the problem. Always had been. And now this.

Wayne pushed open the back door, followed by the tap-tap-tap of Sheba’s nails on the hardwood floor. “Go see Mommy,” he said, chuckling. “Go see what she’s got for ya.” The dog raced across the room and slid to a stop at  the stove, her fat tail thumping against Ada’s legs.

“Sit,” Ada said. “Sit, girl.”

Wayne walked up behind her and kissed her neck. “Anything for me?”

“Supper’s almost ready.” She wiped her hands on her apron and reached for the two plates they used every night for dinner, her mind full of the changes her husband didn’t even know were coming. She’d be stacking three plates soon, setting another place. She looked over at Wayne and let out a long, slow breath.

“What?” he said. 

 “Larry was here today,” she said, avoiding his eyes as she set down the plates.

“What’d he want this time?” Ada almost started to chastise him, as she always did whenever they talked about their youngest child, but stopped herself. No point. No defense. Not this time. She pulled out two faded napkins from the basket in the middle of the table, slid one beside each plate, and added forks and knives.

“Ada, I asked you a question. What did Larry want?”

Ada silently rehearsed her lines one more time as she emptied the pot of boiling potatoes into a bowl and pulled out a tray of biscuits from the oven. She slid them into a basket lined with a checkered napkin and set it on the table. She reached for a platter and started scooping up the chicken with a fork.

“Larry and Alice are getting a divorce,” she said finally, without looking up. She set the platter of chicken on the table.   

“Well, that’s hardly news, is it?” Wayne said, shifting in his chair. “Even Larry can’t stay married to a woman who’s decided her hobby’s being a whore.”

“It’s worse than that, Wayne,” Ada said, setting the pitcher on the table. “Alice was arrested. Found drunk and naked in the fountain in downtown Andover.”

“Jesus Christ.”

Ada pulled off her apron and sat down at the table. She folded her hands and looked down at her lap. Wayne sighed, put down his fork and folded his hands, too. “Bless O Lord this food to our use and us to thy loving service,” Ada said. She glanced at Wayne. “And keep us ever mindful of the needs of others. Amen.”

“Amen,” Wayne said as he poked a chicken thigh with his fork and dropped it on his plate. “To get back to my original question, what did Lester want today? Besides pity.”

Ada picked up the basket of biscuits and held it in front of him.

“Ada, what did Lester want?” he said, taking two.

Ada smoothed the napkin on her lap. “It’s about Ellie.”

Wayne bit off a chunk of chicken. “What about Ellie?”

“Larry wants us to take her in.”

Wayne stopped chewing. “What? What the hell?”

Ada set down her fork. 

“What do you mean take her in? For how long?”

“For good, Wayne. Larry wants us to raise her.”

The biscuits danced in the basket as Wayne slammed a fist on the table. “Raise her! Raise her? What about his other kids?”

Ada shrugged her shoulders. “Well, Larry’s got a lady friend, as it turns out. Name’s Florence. They want to get married. She likes little Chrissy and Beth, but she thinks Ellie’s too old.”

 “Ellie is only seven,” Wayne said.

“Old enough to grow up remembering when Florence wasn’t her mother, I guess.”

“So, he’s just gonna dump her?”

“No, honey,” Ada said, locking eyes with him. “We’re going to welcome her into our home. We’re going to raise her.”

Wayne slammed his fist on the table again, but Ada refused to flinch. He was angry, but he was just making noise. In nearly 40 years of marriage, her Wayne had never raised a hand to her.

“We’re done raising children, Ada. I’m 60, and you’re 56, for Christ’s sake.”

“She’s our granddaughter, Wayne. Either we take her, or strangers are going to raise her. Think about that. Our Ellie with a bunch of people we don’t know. What kind of people adopt a seven-year-old girl? Who knows what they’d do to her?”

Wayne pushed his plate away and threw his napkin on it. “I’ll be damned.”

“You barely touched your dinner,” Ada said, reaching for his hands. He pulled away and stood up. “You spoiled that boy, Ada,” he said. “Always made excuses for Larry, because he was the baby. Twenty-five, and he still hasn’t grown up.” He walked over to the kitchen window and grabbed his Marlboros on the windowsill. “You want her, you raise her,” he said. “I’m done. I don’t want anything to do with this.”

Ada walked over to him and held him from behind. “You don’t mean that,” she said, pressing her cheek against his back.

He shrugged. “I do right now.” He whistled for Sheba. “C’mon, girl,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.” The dog jumped up and followed him out the door.

Ada watched Wayne march to the shed in a cloud of cigarette smoke, Sheba at his heels. She’d won, but she could already feel the cost of this victory. She walked over to the telephone on the kitchen wall, picked up the receiver and waited for the operator’s voice.

“Yes, Joanie, get me Andover 457, please,” she said. “That’s right. Larry.”

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