AS PAPA DROVE THE WAGON up the wide main street, Hanna rose from her seat at the back and peeked around the edge of the canvas cover. She saw packed-dirt streets and buildings of raw lumber identified by hand-lettered signs: a dry-goods store, a hardware store, a saloon, a feed store. There was even a furniture shop, a rarity in these hinterlands.

It seems like a nice enough place.

Wishful thinking, maybe. LaForge was little different from the other frontier towns she had seen: the railroad at the north end, with Main Street at a right angle to it, leading to the livery at the south end. A brand-new town, equal measures of promise and uncertainty, like the thin April sunshine in which it stood.

The hotel was near the depot. Papa got them a room for the night. Hanna climbed the stairs along the outside of the building carrying a valise and a sack atop a wooden box. With her bonnet tied on firmly and the load piled high in her arms, her face was mostly hidden from view.

Papa followed her into the room with his own valise. “All right?” he asked.

She set her belongings down and nodded.

He went to the window and pulled the curtain across. “Livery next,” he said. “I won’t be long.” He would take their horses, Chester the roan and Cherry the sorrel mare, to be boarded at the livery, and park the wagon there too.

He didn’t have to tell her to stay away from the window, out of sight. She knew what to do, after so many months and so many towns. Papa always thought it best that he acquaint himself with a few folks and set up either a dry-goods or a tailoring business before people found out about her.

And same as always, she couldn’t stop herself from hoping: Maybe this would be the last move for her and Papa, the last time she would have to hide her face on arriving in a new town.

She closed the door behind him and turned the key in the lock. Then she crossed the room and put the wooden box on the bed. Work would make the time go faster.

Mama’s button box was one of the few things from the shop in Los Angeles that had made the long journey with them. During the trip, the box had been joggled and jostled and overturned completely more than once. She unlatched the little hook, lifted the lid, and saw what she had suspected: buttons all jumbled together willy-nilly.

“Rotten eggs,” she muttered, using Mama’s favorite curse.

Papa had made the box to Mama’s design. It was a rec­tangular tray covered with a hinged lid and fitted with a wooden grid that divided the space inside into dozens of compartments. The largest button box Hanna had ever seen, it held the hundreds of buttons that Mama had collected for years.