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

Her name was Ruth Abernathy.

Fifty-six. A retired librarian from Milwaukee. Her husband, Walt, had died fourteen months earlier. Heart attack. In the parking lot of a hardware store, on a Saturday morning, buying a new hose.

“He was supposed to retire in May,” she said. “We’d booked this. The deposit was paid. Then he was gone and I couldn’t make myself cancel it. So I postponed it. Then I postponed it again.”

“Why now?”

She looked out the window at the Chicago suburbs going by.

“Because the travel insurance company sent me a letter,” she said. “My credit was going to expire. Use it or lose it. I’m a librarian. I hate to waste anything.”

I laughed. I hadn’t laughed since February.

I told her about Maggie. About the folder. About the note at the bottom of the list.

She was quiet for a long time.

“Window seat for Eddie,” she said softly.

“That’s me.”

“Then you’d better take this one,” she said, and stood up, and moved over one chair. “The mountains are on this side.”

The first day was Illinois, then Iowa, then Nebraska. Corn and more corn. Sun on the fields. We talked the whole way. About books. About our spouses. About our kids. About the strange, empty feeling of a house where the other person’s coffee cup is still in the cupboard and you can’t bring yourself to move it.

“I still set out two,” Ruth said. “Every morning. Fourteen months. Then I put his back.”

“I still talk to Maggie in the car,” I said. “Out loud. Mostly about other drivers.”

“Walt hated other drivers.”

“Everybody’s husband hated other drivers.”

At dinner in the dining car, Amtrak seats you with strangers. They put us at a table with a young couple from Germany on their honeymoon. The German girl looked at us across the table and said, in perfect English, “How long have you two been married?”

Ruth and I looked at each other.

“Oh,” Ruth said. “We’re not—”

“We just met,” I said. “This morning.”

The German girl looked confused.

“But you look so comfortable,” she said.

That night, in my roomette, alone, I lay awake a long time listening to the train go across Nebraska in the dark.

And for the first time since February, I wasn’t thinking about Maggie.

I was thinking about the morning.

About the mountains.

About whether Ruth would be in the observation car.