“Do you speak Finnish or Swedish?” Kennet asked.

“A little of both, and neither very well.” Her fingers pinched another tack out of the box and hopped westward from Sweden, over to England. “From the time I was four, I lived here. In Cheshire.”

“What did you do?”

“Do? Grow up and work my fingers to the bone on my Pa’s dairy farm.” She shuddered. “That’s a miserable existence. Never cared much for beasts and I’m not all that keen on cheese. And running a dairy business means being so relentlessly hygienic, you may as well be a surgeon.” She lit another cigarette. “It got better when I learned to cook for forty farmhands. I’d rather do that all day than muck out cowsheds.”

“Did you go to school?”

“Of course. Wasn’t much good at it. Never managed any levels or a leaving certificate. Then Pa had real bad luck when foot-and-mouth came through in nineteen twenty-three.”

“What’s foot-and-mouth?”

“Bloody nasty disease for livestock. Gives them blisters in their mouths and on their feet. Some of them go lame. The farm started to fail, so my sister and I figured we’d try to find a better wage.” She took another red pin and skimmed it across the Atlantic Ocean, back into the familiar territory of New York State, finally pressing just off the shore of Lake Erie.

“You know Jamestown?” she asked.

“Farfar lived there when he first came to America.”

They smiled at each other, as if discovering they were long-lost cousins, and in that moment, Kennet thought Marta was berries.

“Lots of Swedes in Jamestown,” she said. “We had some relations there, and they gave us a base. I worked at a hotel for a bit, but in housekeeping, not cooking.” She sniffed, as if recalling a bad smell. “But then guess where I went?”

Kennet couldn’t imagine. His few trips to Canada and his one sighting of Niagara Falls paled in comparison to Marta’s journeys. Her life was a transcontinental adventure while he’d been nowhere and done nothing. His eyes jumped to the other side of the country, looking for the most absurd, improbable place, and he poked a finger in the skinny panhandle of Idaho.

“Oh, get away,” she said, laughing. She pressed a pin into Texas, kitty-corner to where the state’s outline made a sharp right angle. “Slaton, Texas.”

“Why’d you go there?”

“I answered an ad in the paper. The Fred Harvey Company was advertising for young women to be waitresses in Mr. Harvey’s restaurants. He built eating houses all along the Santa Fe railroad and he wanted nice girls to wait on the customers. It was just my ticket: work in a restaurant and see a bit of the country.”

She fetched a small scrapbook off her dresser and turned its thick pages. “Here we are. Rattle of drums, fanfare of horns. Ladies and gentlemen, the Harvey Girls.”