Gently, Teacher explained the difference between a lie and a story. A lie was something you told because you were mean or a coward. A story was something you made up out of something that might have happened. Only you didn’t tell it like it was; you told it like you thought it should have been.
—Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Samantha 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 scrawled 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 powder blue 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 she could see life stirring in this rural patch of Ohio. Kitchen windows were aglow, bracketing lives like the frames of a movie reel. She saw a man in a barn coat reach for his hat on a hook. Three frames later, another man opened a door and a small dog slipped out and quickly squatted. 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, Sam thought, 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 bony 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 rearview 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,” he said.
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 train case lid. For all of Sam’s life, the powder blue leather case had sat on the top 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 had called Sam into the bedroom and patted the spot next to her on the bed. She reached for the train case sitting beside her and placed it on the bed between them.
“You remember Aunt Nessa,” she said.
“Sure,” Sam 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 early 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?”