On the Train From Chicago to San Francisco, the Woman in the Seat Next to Me Was Taking the Same Trip My Late Wife and I Planned for 30 Years and Never Took. She Was Doing It for the Same Reason

The ticket agent at Union Station in Chicago looked at my reservation and frowned.

“Two passengers in the roomette, Mr. Carver?”

“One,” I said. “It was supposed to be two.”

She didn’t ask. Train people have seen everything.

I’m Edmund Carver. I’m 58. I taught high school English in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, for thirty-one years. I retired in June.

My wife, Maggie, died in February.

For thirty years, we talked about one trip.

The California Zephyr. Chicago to the San Francisco Bay. Fifty-one hours, over the Rockies and the Sierra Nevada to the Pacific.

Every year, we said next year. When the house is paid off. When we retire. When her chemotherapy is done.

The chemo was never done.

In August, I found the folder she’d kept in her nightstand. Thirty years of train brochures, route maps, a list of what to pack in her handwriting. At the bottom of the list, she’d written:

*Window seat for Eddie. He’ll want to see the mountains.*

I bought the ticket that night.

One.

On the platform, walking to car 0532, I almost turned around four times.

And when I found my seat in the observation car, the big one with glass all the way up to the ceiling, there was already a woman sitting in the chair next to it.

Silver hair cut short. A blue scarf. A thermos. A worn paperback in her lap.

And on the table in front of her, an old Amtrak brochure, exactly like the one in Maggie’s folder.

She saw me looking at it.

“My husband’s,” she said. “We were going to take this trip for thirty years.”