In an America that might have been, two war orphans from a divided nation, one in the north and one in the south, meet across a vast battlefield, striking out to forge a future together in the west. It's 1892, the fourth and bloodiest year of the Ci...
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Kay helped Grace pull down boxes and trunks from the attic and closets. Most of it was junk, some of it was strange, and some of it was precious. Precious, like the embroidery off her great grandpa's Revolutionary War uniform. He had been in the cavalry, the First City Troop, and served under George Washington himself. Strange, like the small porcelain dog wrapped up in a box. Why hadn't she put it out? It was very pretty. Kay felt that it had to have had a story, and she was sad that the story was lost now. Now, it was just a porcelain dog.
They stacked the clothes and many of her grandmother's things to give to the church. The church sold things like this to help widows and returning veterans. Some of grandma's old hats were fun, and Kay tried them on in front of the mirror. They reminded her of old times.
Some things smelled of cigar smoke and she wondered if that had been Grandpa. Grandma had saved his straight razor and spectacles. He was quite blind at the end. She labeled these by gluing looped strips of paper with notes around them.
There was a pocket watch and inside of the lid was a picture of a baby. Grace looked at it and tsked. "That was your father's," she said. "That's you when you were a baby. I remember when they had it taken, the year before he left to go out West. He must have left it with your mother." Kay slipped it into the pocket of her apron. Later that night, before bed, she wound it and listened to it tick as she went to sleep and thought of her father.
The next day, as they were eating breakfast, Grace brought up the problem of the house. There really was no avoiding it. "You can come and stay with us," she said. "We don't have much room, but there's always a way to find more space." Grace lived in Baltimore with her husband and three kids. Kay had never met them, but Grace was nice and it seemed the only option, at least until she was married.
"I do need to get back too. Bill and the landlady can't be doing the kids any good," Grace said. Bill worked in a factory that stamped machine parts. "It's good work, and since the war started, good money too." They had three rooms on the second floor of a tenement, which was so much better than the single room they had had before the war. Perhaps with Kay's money, Grace felt that they could find a place with four rooms. This didn't sound like a very bright end to Kay, but she really had no other options.
Her grandma had some travelling trunks, which had been emptied and sorted, and into these they packed the precious and some of the strange. She squeezed as much as she could of the really important into her own trunk. The rest would just have to go up for sale. The furniture would go with the house.
That day she walked alone to the bank. She could tell that Grace really wanted to go with her, but she felt that this was something she had to do alone. In the envelope she had found a key with a number stamped on it, along with a note. The note had the name of a downtown bank and the words, "Your mother wanted you to have this," in her grandmother's perfect handwriting. She left the house, walking across the high grass to the edge of the street, crossing the muddy ditch to the street itself over the old board that was laid across. She walked up to the boulevard at the top corner and onto its wood plank sidewalks lined with shops. A block up the street, in its center, was the steam trolley stop. When it arrived, she ducked between the wagons, carriages, and people to climb on, where she paid her nickel to roll downtown.
