But some days, as she pounded away at the mahogany upright in the living room or punished the garage door with her forehands and backhands, Kate found herself feeling restless. Impatient. What was the point? She was young enough that all she had to do was kid things, but she was also getting old enough that she wanted to do more than play games and pretend. She felt ready for something more exciting. More real. Something that actually mattered.

But there wasn’t anything. Just toys and games and tennis and piano. Life always seemed so interesting in books, but then when you had to actually live it nothing all that interesting ever seemed to happen. And unlike in books, you couldn’t skip ahead past the boring parts.

That’s probably why, on the night before her eleventh birthday, Kate sat down and wrote her uncle Herbert a letter. It went like this:

Dear Uncle Herbert—

You’ve never met me but I’m your niece Kate, and since it is my birthday tomorrow and you are super rich do you think you could please send me a present?

Warmly,

Kate

Reading it over, she wasn’t sure it was the greatest letter anybody had ever written, and she wasn’t 100 percent sure that the word please was in the right place. But she thought it contained her personal truth, which her language arts teacher always said was the important thing. So she put it in the mailbox. Probably nobody would ever read it anyway because she hadn’t put an address on the envelope, because she didn’t know where Uncle Herbert lived. She didn’t even have a stamp for it.

Which made it all the more surprising when a present from Uncle Herbert arrived the very next morning. It was a train.

Kate didn’t especially want a train. It’s not like she was into trains, that was more of a Tom thing. Kate was more about books, and LEGOs, and Vanimals, these cute little animals that drove vans, which everybody in her class was insane about and which she liked, too, for some reason that she couldn’t really explain.

But after all she hadn’t asked for anything specific, and she guessed that her uncle probably didn’t have much experience with kids. So. Kate tried to be philosophical about these things.

What was really surprising, though, was how big it was. I mean this thing was really big. Like too big to send through the mail. It arrived at their house on a specially reinforced double-wide flatbed truck with twenty-eight wheels. Tom counted. It was giant and black and incredibly complicated. In fact it didn’t look like a toy at all, it looked like an actual, real, life-sized steam train.

That, Uncle Herbert explained, was because it was one.