"Foosh," Nellie said. She and Edna did look alike, with long faces, brown hair, and very fair skin. She didn't think she was particularly beautiful. Edna made a pretty young woman. She smiled more than Nellie did, which made her look more pleasant-but then, she was looking for a man. Nellie's opinion was that the joys of having even a good one were overrated, but Edna paid as little attention to Nellie's opinions as she could get away with.
A customer came in and ordered a fried-egg sandwich to go with his coffee. He was young and moderately handsome, with a brown Kaiser Bill mustache whose upthrust points were waxed to formidable perfection. Edna took care of him before Nellie could. That might have been funny, were it happening for the first time. Having seen it throughout the war, Nellie was sick and tired of it.
She made eggs for herself and her husband, too-after so many years as a widow, she found the idea of having a husband very strange. When Hal had eaten, he said, "I'm going to go across the street and get some things done." He chuckled. "Can't have folks say my wife does all the work in the family, now can I?"
"Not when it isn't true," Nellie said. "Go upstairs and get your overcoat, though, before you set foot outdoors." Jacobs nodded and headed for the stairs.
Edna laughed. "There you go, Ma! You're telling him what to do like you've been married twenty years." Nellie made a face at her, and not a happy one. Jacobs laughed again going upstairs. That was luck, nothing else. He could as easily have grown angry at the idea of being ordered about.
Well bundled, he walked across the snowy street and opened the cobbler's shop. He wouldn't get much business today. He had to know it, too. The shop was part of his routine, though, as running the coffeehouse was part of Nellie's. She was glad he kept his independence and let her keep hers.
A barrel with a bulldozer blade welded to the prow rumbled down the street, pushing snow aside-and up onto the sidewalk, making the drifts higher and making it even harder for people to come into the coffeehouse or the cobbler's shop. The barrel driver cared nothing about that. Having been occupied by the Confederates for more than two and a half years and then devastated in the U.S. reconquest, Washington remained under martial law with the war months over.
Trucks roared by in the barrel's wake: it was for them that the bigger, heavier machine had cleared a path. Rubble filled their beds. Had rubble been gold, Washington would have spawned a rush to make the stampede to California seem as nothing beside it. But it wasn't gold. It was only rubble. It had to be disposed of, not sought out.
When Nellie opened the front door to take a cup of coffee to Hal, she found she couldn't, not without shoveling her way to the street. By the time she and Edna did the shoveling, the coffee was cold. She poured it out, got a fresh one, and took it across the street. Then she discovered she had to shovel her way into her husband's shop. That meant another trip back for coffee that was hot. Some of the things she said about the U.S. government were less than complimentary.
Her husband was fixing a soldier's boot when she finally came in. The only difference between 1918 and 1916 was that it was a U.S., not a Confederate, boot. "Coffee? How nice. How thoughtful," he said. His eyes twinkled. "And what do you hear in the coffeehouse that might interest an old shoemaker, eh?"
Nellie laughed. He hadn't just been a shoemaker during the war. He'd been part of a spy ring keeping tabs on what the Confederates did in and around Washington. He'd helped Nellie get coffee and food when they were scarce and hard to come by. Since she had them, her place had been popular among Confederate officers and homegrown collaborators. In turn, she'd passed on what she overheard to him.
She had an Order of Remembrance. First Class, straight from the hands of Theodore Roosevelt because of that. Edna had an Order of Remembrance, Second Class, which was richly undeserved: she'd been on the point of marrying a Confederate officer when he died in a U.S. artillery barrage. So far as Nellie knew, Hal had no decorations of his own. That struck her as dreadfully unfair, but he'd never once said a word about it where she could hear.
Nor did he now. He drank the coffee quickly, savoring the warmth she'd had to work so hard to get him. Then he remarked, "If you look over there, you'll see they are building the Washington Monument a little higher now."
She looked out the window. Before the war, she would have been able to see only the tip of the monument over the buildings between it and the shop. Rebel bombardment and U.S. counterattacks had truncated the white stone obelisk. She could still see more of it now than she'd seen before the war, because the fighting had also leveled most of the buildings formerly in the way.
Hal said, "I hear they're starting to rebuild the White House and the Capitol, too "
"They'll be pretty," Nellie said. "Past that, I don't know why anybody would bother. They'll just get blown up again when the next war comes, and I can't see the president and Congress coming down from Philadelphia, can you?"
"To spend all their time here, the way they used to do?" Hal Jacobs shook his head. "No. Not when we are still so close to Virginia, even though the USA will hold the land down to the Rappahannock. But maybe to come down for ceremonial sessions: that, yes. That I could see."
"I suppose you may be right," Nellie said after a little thought. "Teddy Roosevelt is the sort to enjoy ruffles and flourishes, no doubt about that. He'd love to make the Rebs grind their teeth, too. They were going on about how Washington would be theirs forever. Reckon they didn't know everything there is to know."
"They were wrong," her husband agreed. "They will pay the price for being wrong. But we have paid a great price because they were wrong, too. I hope that will never happen again."
"Oh, I hope so, too," Nellie said. "I hope so with all my heart. But when I said people wouldn't come back to the White House and the Capitol on account of they'd get blown up in the next war, I didn't hear you telling me I was wrong."
"We have fought three wars against the Confederate States," Hal said. "I hope we do not fight a fourth one. I pray we do not fight a fourth one. A man should plan by what he has seen, though, not by what he hopes and prays. The older I get, the more certain I am this is true."
Nellie studied him. No, he wasn't handsome. No, he didn't make her heart flutter. And yet, as she had seen during the war and as she saw even more strongly now, he had a core of solid good sense that was altogether admirable. She did admire it, and him.
She hadn't been looking for anyone to make her heart flutter. That was for people Edna's age. Good sense, though-good sense lasted. The older Nellie got herself, the plainer that became.
She smiled at her new husband. It was the most wifely smile she'd ever given him. It was also the smile of someone beginning to realize she'd made a good bargain after all.
John Oglethorpe came up to Scipio as the Negro was clearing dishes off a table a customer had just left. The restaurant owner coughed. Scipio knew what that sort of cough meant: Oglethorpe was about to say something he only half wanted to say. Scipio could make a good guess about what it was, too.
His guess wasn't just good. It turned out to be right. After clearing his throat a couple more times, Oglethorpe said, "You've done a right good job for me here, Xerxes. I want you to know I mean that."
"I thanks you very much, suh," Scipio answered. Xerxes was the name he'd used since escaping the collapsing Congaree Socialist Republic and making his way across South Carolina to Augusta, Georgia. In his proper persona, he had a hefty price on his head, though Georgia worried more about its own black Reds on the loose than about those from other states.
"You've been just about as good a waiter as Aurelius, matter of fact," Oglethorpe went on. The other Negro had conveniently put himself out of sight and earshot. Oglethorpe coughed yet again. "But him and me, we go back years, and I ain't got enough business to keep two waiters busy any more, not with so much of the war work closed down, I ain't."