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Lisa Sample was born in Tama in 1969. Before she came to Collins she’d lived most of her life, as she told Sarah Jane the first day they met, in Pottawattamie County, which is quite some ways from Tama. Her father’d worked for a while with cattlemen in Omaha. His whole family had lived in Crescent, just across the Mormon Bridge.
It was her mother, Irene, who’d originally come from Tama; after the baby was born, she’d moved west for the second and last time. She packed what she wanted to keep into two old suitcases and left the rest of her room in state: a bed with a floral coverlet, an oak lampstand, a chair too big to fit into the Chevrolet. “All the furniture you’ll ever want back in Walnut,” Peter Sample had said cheerfully, trying to put a good face on it: Walnut was an hour’s drive from Crescent and full of antique stores. But to Irene leaving Tama was like sawing down a whole brace of trees that shielded a house from the wind. “Almost Nebraska,” Lisa’d said to Sarah Jane to help her locate Pottawattamie County in her mind. She meant to emphasize its remoteness, but also to keep her claim where it belonged: in Iowa, where she was born.
Irene Colton had lived away from Tama before; she wasn’t entirely rootbound. In 1957, she’d won a scholarship to Ottumwa Heights College. It was during her senior year there that she met Peter Sample. He was changing trains on the way home from Chicago, where he’d spent the week at a cattlemen’s convention; every weekend she picked up one shift at Henry’s Drive-In. It was Sunday. He sat at the counter and ordered a hamburger with coleslaw and mashed potatoes, but when he got out his Bankamericard to pay the bill, Irene pointed at the CASH ONLY sign on the counter. He was embarrassed, but she reached into her apron. “It’s on me,” she said; her smile looked genuine because it was.
A week later her manager brought her an envelope addressed to her; tucked inside a greeting card with a picture of Omaha on the front were three one-dollar bills. Greetings from Omaha, it said on the front, and, inside, in admirably neat handwriting: “Thanks for lunch. Hope to see you if I pass through again.”
Idly, just for fun, she wrote back to him at the return address on the envelope, thanking him; “Everybody loves the story of the Omaha man who sent me three dollars,” she said. About a month later, she got another letter, and when she answered that one he wrote back again. His letters were all substance, but light fare: pleasant, harmless, transparent thoughts from a young man who lived alone and worked around cattle. He spoke with the assumed familiarity of the irredeemably local: the guy who owns the Texaco opened up a used-car lot behind the station, I’m thinking about buying a station wagon from him; the city bought a new snowplow and the chief of police personally drives it; the Dillow family is selling their house, it’s hard to believe, their name goes back around here for generations. It felt like he needed somebody to talk to; reading his gentle unburdenings made her feel like she was doing somebody some good, which she liked.
In college she’d known plenty of boys who had Peter Sample beat for worldliness, even though he’d seen more of the world than they had; but she reckoned this in his favor, not theirs. His courtship was obvious and awkward, and felt of a piece with the small-town manners she’d learned as a child: the easy touch of the everyday, the pervasive mild formality. In the autumn of 1963, he visited Tama, taking an extra day on his way to a conference he didn’t really need to attend. Her family liked him.
She’d worked all summer doing clerical work for a dentist; it didn’t seem like a great use of her education, but she wasn’t sure what else she was supposed to do with her life. So when Peter’s visits began to observe a predictable quarterly pattern, following the seasons, Irene was receptive. One spring he brought a carton of frozen steaks packed in dry ice: “I get them at cost,” he said, not wanting to seem extravagant. Still, her father relished making the same joke at the table several times over the next month: “I feel like the president!” he said.