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 was surprised by the force when its metal latches sprang open. “It feels so new,” she said, opening the case. She leaned in and sniffed the silky gray lining. “Smells new, too.”
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.
Now, in the car, 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. 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. Sandstorm, 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 had said to Sam.
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. Sandstorm’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.”
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 prize 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 four 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 other close friend, Lenny Kleshinski, 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 had 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.”