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pulled something out.
    It was a baseball.
    “Won it on a bet, mon petit ,” Jack whispered to his son and slipped the ball beneath the boy’s leather pillow. “Got it autographed, too. Joe Dawson.”
    Romaine weaved unsteady as he slipped his broken watch off its fob. He tapped the crystal impatiently.
    “Papa’s gotta sleep,” he announced to the heedless room, and dropped like a loose suit onto the couch.
     
     
    First light. A rising sun caught the ramparts on what anyone would be excused for believing to be a castle. Cincinnati’s workhouse was an impressive stretch of architecture. Three tiers of cells housed inmates behind iron-barred windows that ran one-and-a-half football fields down the street. Corner towers rose to break up that long expanse, along with a mansarded center section. The walls were corbelled like ancient fortresses, and machicolations were cut at intervals as if hot tar or boiling water were to be poured down upon some unwitting invader.
    Sally Price had not expected to leave the workhouse alive. She had spent a year-and-a-half looking over her shoulder, fearing a garrotte or knife. But the forbidding walls had proven safe, and now Sally was free, a woman of thirty, small, unattractive, with an adolescent’s perennially blemished complexion, narrow eyes and poverty of hair.
    A sour German matron behind a metal grille required Sally to sign for the same portmanteau she’d brought to prison; all her earthly possessions were lumped in that bag. Well, almost all. Sally had already changed out of the striped muslin which identified her as a thief. A plaid skirt and sweater had replaced her prison garb.
    “Make sure it’s all there,” the clerk instructed.
    A change of underwear. A pair of eyeglasses, broken. A woolen handbag that Sally did not open.
    “That’s everything.”
    A pair of guards lingered as Miss Price received her final dispensation through a porthole in the chickenwire grill. Three dollars and seventy cents. Earned during time served.
    “Don’t spend it all in one place,” a screw mocked her.
    “How ’bout my letter?”
    The guard smirked. “Oh, Sally always gets her letter, don’t she? Every month, hah, Sal? Like yer period.”
    Sally just waited. Silently.
    The clerk scowled, “Awright,” and shoved a manila envelope through the wire along with a pen and clipboard.
    “Sign here. And again for your copy.”
    Sally signed the receipts slowly, elaborately.
    “Gotta hand you one thing, Price. You keep it buttoned better than most.”
    Sally did not reply. It seemed, still, the safest thing to do.
     
     
    The whitewashed wall opposite the Romaines’ home beat back a rising sun. Mama Erbet stirred sleepily. Martin slumbered over the baseball he did not yet know nestled inside his glove. Jack woke up still dressed and holding his head. He looked at his son, his son’s grandmother, and the cheaply framed photograph hanging on the wall above his sofa and bed.
    It could have been a movie marquee. A striking young woman with raven hair and Hollywood eyelashes smiles buoyantly in the arms of a handsome American corpsman beneath the Arc de Triomphe.
    Jack lingered over the photo a long moment. “Jill,” he appealed through a mouth dry as clay. “Jack and Jill.”
    He left the sofa, wobbled over to the water pitcher handy on the sill and slurped water straight from its metal lip. Only then did Jack glance outside to notice—
    The wall of the tenement on the other side of the street glowing pink with a well-risen sun.
    “Shit!”
     
     
    Sally Price emerged from prison to find an open street milling with people. What might at first have seemed to be a curb-side celebration was in fact a congress of citizens gathered to protest conditions inside the workhouse.
    REHABILITATION, NOT INCARCERATION, a well-lettered banner fluttered damply. WORK WITH DIGNITY, urged a placard alongside.
    Some of Cincinnati’s wealthiest were turned out in a public display of progressive