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dome-lidded trunks.
    From time to time Amy had been allowed to accompany her aunt or mother when they went into the storeroom to put something away or just to dust and clean. A few other times, she had spent hours there with her mother, going through some of the old trunks. Together they had looked at old china-headed dolls with kid leather bodies, tarnished silver spoons, and fancy baby dresses. In a box marked School Days, they had found dozens of old report cards, and fancy certificates awarded for Sunday School attendance, or Bible verses memorized, or good handwriting. Another trunk was almost entirely full of old photographs. There were hundreds of photographs, sorted into large envelopes, or neatly mounted in albums with puffy velvet covers. It took hours to look through all the photographs, because Amy’s mother knew a story to go with almost every one.
    One of the first pictures in the fanciest old album was a favorite of Amy’s. It was a wedding picture, the wedding of Amy’s grandfather and grandmother. Amy’s grandfather, with a darker beard and hair but otherwise looking much the same as he did in all his other pictures, was standing stiff and straight beside a chair in which his bride was sitting, dressed in a beautiful white dress with a long lacy veil.
    Looking at that picture always gave Amy an interesting feeling—a curious feeling, beautiful and exciting, but very sad. It was sad to look at someone so young and smiling, and know that the person had died so soon afterward, leaving two little girls without a mother. And what made it seem especially tragic, so tragic that Amy could get a tight feeling in her throat just thinking about it, was the fact that she had been so very beautiful—and that her name had been Amy. Looking at her picture made Amy wonder about things—things like being beautiful, and dying.
    Once when she had been in the storeroom alone, she had put the album down and, going over to the mirror on the rosewood dresser, she had pulled the back of her skirt up over her head like a veil and smiled, trying to make her face warm, blond, and glowing, like that other Amy’s had been when she had her picture taken for her wedding, on June the twenty-first, 1896, in Des Moines, Iowa.
    There were not many other pictures of Amy’s grandmother in the albums, and in the few there were, she looked much different from the way she did in the wedding picture. In one labeled Abigail 2 years, Helen 6 months, she was shown sitting in a rocking chair holding two babies on her lap. In that picture the other Amy’s blond hair was pulled back close to her head and her face looked blurred and faded.
    “There we are, Abigail and I, when we were just babies,” Amy’s mother had said when she showed Amy the picture. “Just look at those curls.”
    “Is that your mama?” Amy had asked.
    “Why, yes, of course.”
    “She looks so different from the way she looks in the other picture.”
    Amy’s mother had held the picture to the light and examined it carefully. “Yes, she does,” she said. “I suppose she wasn’t very well when the picture was taken. She was never very well after they came to Taylor Springs. She died when I was only six years old, you know. I don’t remember her much at all, but Abigail does. Abigail remembers her very well.”
    “Wasn’t it awful?” Amy asked. “Wasn’t it terrible to have your mama die when you were so little?”
    “Yes,” her mother said. “It was very sad. But I was so young at the time that I don’t think I really understood what had happened. I don’t remember much about how I felt at the time. And we were very fortunate to have such a wonderful father. Even though we had lost our mother, Abigail and I were never neglected for a moment. Our papa saw to that.”
    Amy’s mother usually spoke of her father as “our papa,” and she spoke of him a lot. Although he had died three years before Amy was born, she always felt as if she had known him.