But what this alternate didn't have were superpowers. Nobody was strong enough to tell anybody else not to do something or else and make the or else stick. Every time a squabble started here, people worried. Caught in the middle of a war, Justin was one of those worried people.
When the bombers flew over Elizabeth, Beckie didn't know what was going on. The Snodgrasses didn't have the TV on. Mr. Snodgrass was looking at some of his coins. Mrs. Snodgrass and Gran were going back and forth about something that had happened when they were both much younger than Beckie was now. They remembered it two different ways.
Beckie didn't think it mattered which of them was right, but they both seemed to. Not even the roar in the sky slowed them down. It made Beckie jam her fingers in her ears. When it was over, she said, "Don't you have laws against low-flying planes here? We sure do back home." She wished she were back home.
Her grandmother and Mrs. Snodgrass went on arguing with each other. They didn't care about jets landing on the roof, let alone flying over it. Mr. Snodgrass looked up from the silver florin he was examining. He spoke in a soft, sad voice: "All the rules go out the window in a war, Rebecca."
"In a—? Oh!" She hadn't even thought of that. California hadn't been in a real war since more than twenty years before she was born. And that one was fought more with software than with germs or bombs. "Do you really think those were . . . warplanes?"
"I don't know what else they could have been," Ted Snodgrass answered.
"And that was when the cat threw up the hairball in his lap," Gran said triumphantly.
"It was no such thing," Ethel Snodgrass said. "How could it be, when he didn't come over till two days later?"
Mr. Snodgrass looked from one of them to the other. "Good thing they don't have bombers, I reckon," he said to Beckie.
That held so much truth, it hurt. Beckie started laughing so she wouldn't start to cry. Gran looked bewildered—she hadn't heard what Mr. Snodgrass said. Her cousin had. Husbands and wives often listened to each other out of the corner of their ear, as it were. "That's not funny, Ted," Ethel Snodgrass said.
"Well, maybe it isn't," he said. He wasn't the kind of man who got in a fight for the sake of getting in a fight. But he wasn't the kind of man who backed away when he thought he was right, either. "Don't you reckon you're being silly, going on and on about how things happened when Hector was a pup? What difference does it make now?"
"It makes a difference, all right," his wife answered, though she didn't say what sort of difference it made.
"It sure does," Gran said. Then she kind of blinked and scratched her head. She wasn't used to agreeing with anybody about anything.
The phone rang. "Saved by the bell," Mr. Snodgrass said, and pulled it out of his pocket. "Hello? .. . Oh, hello, Mr. Brooks. . .. Yes, tomorrow morning would be fine. . . . Ten o'clock? Sure, that'll work. See you then. Will your nephew be along? . . . All right. 'Bye now." He hung up. "That was the coin fella," he announced.
"I never would have guessed." Mrs. Snodgrass could sound a lot like Gran. Anybody would have figured they were related. Mrs. Snodgrass seemed to have a little more style with her sarcasm, though.
"The young man'll be along to pass the time of day," Mr. Snodgrass added to Beckie. His wife might not have spoken, as far as he was concerned. She might not even have been in the same county. He went on, "I expect he's more interesting than old folks going on about what happened a long time ago. I expect he may even be more interesting than these Georgia shillings from the 1920s."
Beckie had no idea how to answer that, so she didn't try. Gran and Ethel Snodgrass went back to arguing about what had happened a long time ago. Mrs. Snodgrass didn't stop arguing even when she served up ham and corn on the cob for supper. The food was terrific. It didn't taste as if it was made in a factory and frozen and came off a supermarket shelf. It tasted as if somebody down the street had raised the hog and smoked the ham and grown the corn. And somebody down the street probably had. Lots of people in Elizabeth had little gardens and kept a few pigs and chickens.
Dessert was a cherry pie that also never saw the inside of a freezer. Beckie was just finishing up when jets flew over again, this time from west to east. "I hope those are our planes coming home again," Mr. Snodgrass said. "If they aren't. . . Well, if they aren't we've got even more trouble than I was afraid we did."
"How will we know if they're not?" Beckie asked.
"If you hear things go boom, that's a pretty good clue," he answered. He got off zingers even more readily than his wife did, but in a nicer tone of voice.
And what he said usually had the ring of truth behind it. For the next half hour, Beckie kept cocking her head to one side and listening for bombs going off. She was relieved when she didn't hear any. Then she wondered if she ought to be relieved. Virginia wasn't a very free place. But Ohio wasn't her state, either. She just wished they would have held off on their stupid war till she got home. No doubt that was a selfish attitude, but it was how she felt.
"Mr. Snodgrass!" she said suddenly.
"What is it?"
"Do you have any coins from the days of the old United States?"
"Yes, I think so. A few. That's a long time ago now—almost three hundred years since things fell apart."
"Could I look at them?" Beckie asked.
"Well, let me see where I've got 'em stashed." Mr. Snodgrass flipped through an album and took a plastic mount off a page. "Here's what they call a quarter dollar from 1801, not long before states started breaking away and going off on their own."
One side of the silver coin showed a woman with flowing hair—Liberty, she was supposed to be. On the other side, an eagle spread its wings. Beckie sighed. "I was just thinking—it might have been neat if the United States stayed united. We wouldn't have all these quarrels and wars in that case."
"We'd probably have something even worse. Things happen for the best—I'm sure of it," Mr. Snodgrass said. "Besides, holding that mess together just wasn't in the cards. The little states wouldn't admit that they weren't as important as places like Virginia and Pennsylvania. Imagine—there was a place called Rhode Island. It's part of Massachusetts now, of course, but in those days you could spit from one side of it to the other, near enough. And it said it had to be as strong in Congress— that's what they called the United States legislature—as anybody else."
"I remember reading about how it got founded—they teach us that even on the West Coast," Beckie said. "And I know it's not a state any more. Was that the Second Northeastern War or the Third?"
"The Second, I think, but don't hold me to it." Ted Snodgrass chuckled. "I haven't studied that stuff in a lot longer than you." He paused. "I haven't studied it in school, I should say, but you learn some history if you collect coins, too." After he got out another album, he showed Beckie a stout silver coin, as big as a five-peso piece back home. "See? It's a commemorative from 1837, and that means it's from after the Second Northeastern War."
She looked at the coin. COMMONWEALTH OF MASSACHUSETTS, it said, and 2 FLORINS. A bald man with sideburns was identified as John Quincy Adams. On the other side, the coin showed a cannon and the words LIBERATION OF PROVIDENCE. "Did the people who lived in Providence think they were liberated?" she asked, handing it back.
"Don't bet on it," Mr. Snodgrass answered. "If I recollect right, somebody from Rhode Island took a shot at old Adams not long after that."
"You're right!" Beckie exclaimed. "They made a movie about it—I've seen it on TV. If the movie has things straight, Adams deserved it."