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She nodded. “My great-grandfather won it in glorious combat, at the Battle of...”
That was the trick with details. You actually had to know some. “Well, it was somewhere in Virginia. But out with it. What can you give me for this lot?”
“Other than the bugle, it’s mostly worthless, and I doubt I could get more than two dollars for that.”
Two dollars wasn’t nothing, but it wasn’t enough either. “Listen, Mr. Maloney. If you could find some way to offer a little more, it’d really help.”
Maybe it was her change in tone, but Mr. Maloney squintedat her. “None of my business, but you’re not in some kind of trouble, are you, missy?”
That was the thing about Mr. Maloney. He didn’t push—anyone who buys old wedding and engagement rings for a living knows to be careful. But he was ware she was new to town, living alone, and he cared enough to ask.
“Just saving up for a long-shot dream. You know, the kind you don’t want to talk about in case putting it into words makes it go...” She made a puff of air.
Mr. Maloney nodded slowly, and Ginny knew she’d won.
Funny. That’s what it had taken to soften him up. Maybe he had dreams too, ones that were always out of reach. She gave the tired shop another once-over. Apparently, he’d given up looking for a ladder.
“Five dollars even,” he finally said, and she beamed.
“It’s a real pleasure doing business with you.” Another line borrowed from Pa, the best lobsterman she’d ever seen, who could make deals directly with the fanciest restaurateur, without a supplier go-between.
Mr. Maloney opened the register and fluttered a five-dollar bill in her direction, which she snatched up before he could change his mind.
Yes siree, Danny Maloney was one of a kind, she decided as she flounced out the door. “Don’t let me down, Abraham,” she said sternly to the five-dollar bill before tucking it safely into her purse. After all, with a weight of responsibility on their shoulders to unite a house divided, she and Honest Abe were just about the same person.
Except, maybe, for the honest part. And the beard.
It wasn’t much, but each cent she tucked away in her tin bank shaped like an organ grinder’s monkey—another cast-off—would help her family buy back a bit of Long Island at the end of this awful war.
Sure, she’d pretended to believe Pa when he swore he’d take ajob in Portland and save every penny of the money the government gave them for their property. But deep down, she knew if they ever wanted to get their home back, it would be up to her.
Ginny whistled her way down the street to the library. Time for a reward for a good day’s work. It wasn’t the same satisfaction as bringing in a haul on Pa’s lobster boat, but living in Derby wasn’t so bad, she decided, taking in the lone stoplight, the sunlight glinting off of shop windows with propped-upOut for Lunchsigns, and the owners of those shops ducking into the corner café. Better than Portland, anyway.“Too crowded,”she’d told Ma, explaining why she hadn’t moved in with the rest of the family, along with an excuse about it being time to live on her own. It was enough of the truth that it didn’t count as a lie, not really.
Libraries smelled funny, like something halfway to molding. Then again, Ginny had met folks who thought the docks were the same way. To them, fish and bait and the leftovers of the tide were less a fragrance and more a stench. Matter of perspective, really.
So Ginny just breathed through her mouth as she approached the librarian, scribbling away in her ever-present notebook behind the registration desk.
“Morning, Avis,” she said in what she’d quickly learned was the right tone, quiet enough that the grumpy men in dark suits who came in over their lunch breaks wouldn’t glare at her.
“It’s afternoon,” Avis corrected without looking up, as if the five ticks past twelve were enough to matter. She couldn’t have been more than a few years older than Ginny, but the poor thing was aging a decade every month she spent in that dark, musty place, all stooped over with her head full of numbers and such.
Ginny leaned over to see what she was writing, but each line was crossed off in uneven swipes of pencil. “You know, you really ought to get out of this crypt more. You’re pale as paste.”
“Mmm,” Avis replied, ramming a pencil into her complicatedupswept hairdo—where two other pencils already poked out.
Only when Ginny hefted herself to sit on the desk did Avis finally look up and, sighing, put on her professional librarian manner. “Can I help you?”
“I hope so.” She waggled her eyebrows, hoping for a smile. It didn’t work. “Got anything new?”
“You know I can’t answer that.”
Sure, Ginny knew. But usually Avis made a show of warning her against getting all kinds of ridiculous romantic notions. Today, her shoulders sagged, and her usually perfect hair was mussed.
“Thought I’d at least try.” It was silly anyway, having to sneak into the storage closet for a book.
Ginny had never met the Cavendish lady who owned this place, but she imagined her to be like an irritable dragon. The romances stashed in the storage room because they met her disapproval weren’t even the steamy sort ... though that Georgette Heyer sure could write a good kiss. Ginny had whipped through a dozen in a few months—shop girls who married millionaires, ladies who escaped arranged marriages to dash away with their true love, spies with secret identities who revealed themselves just in time.
It wasn’t so much the endings, which were more or less the same, that were the ticket. It was the getting there that mattered. Why, after only a dozen storage-room novels, Ginny had learned more about romance than her mother had ever bothered to tell her. Sometimes, she wrote down a line or two to use in a letter to Mack—maybe. If she got up the nerve.
