The Beginning of My Last Short Story for the Collection

I can have an idea for a story, and then it takes a life of its own. This final story I am writing for my first collection is growing and giving me twists and turns I never expected.

These following paragraphs begin the story

Then, she was 13, nearly 14, with her blonde hair cropped along her hairline and her emerald green eyes wide-awake. She would be protected by her father, the train's conductor, during this first train ride to where she considered home, not that new town with people she neither understood nor felt comfortable to be around. She was going home, to where her sisters lived, and where her friends still went to school and talked about boys while they walked from one town to another.

That was what they did in 1929. Walked. There were cars then, but not many. Some cars had to be hand-cranked to start the motor running, but mostly the cars had a standard clutch with two seats. Some had rumble seats. Basically, cars were black, but there were dark blue cars or forest green. More than not, the rumble seat's covering matched the inside seating. It was in back of the inside seating and open to the elements of rain, wind, and sun. She didn't like to ride in a rumble seat, away from everybody, alone, away from the laughter. Her sister's friend, Johnny, had a car with a rumble seat, and when he was not farming, he would take them to the next town. Otherwise, they walked the seven miles from one sister's house to the other.

She liked the train ride.She would sit in the seat at the front of the train's car, and her dad would put her belongings on the seat next to her so no one would sit there. She liked watching her dad go to the different people in the train's car and ask them for their ticket and then stay an extra minute and talk with them. Sometimes, he would gesture his head toward her, telling the rider that the waif-life blonde was his daughter. Those moments of recognition made her proud.

With each mile the train moved toward her home, to the town where her sisters lived, now married with children of their own, her smile widened.

Her dad took her away from her home and her sisters when she was barely 13 to the town 150 miles north. He worked for the Illinois Central as a conductor, and neither he nor his family felt the devastation many in the country felt when the stock market crashed that October 29th. He never trusted banks, anyway, always keeping his extra money in tin cans with lids. Sometimes, he buried those tin cans in the yard when no one was looking. He had his job, a new wife, and together they took the two youngest children -- Rosa and Clarence -- to start a new life in a new town.

.........

That is the beginning. Does the story make you want to read more?

Until tomorrow...have a great day.