Peggy wrote poetry. Nearly every day she would jot individual lines on scraps of paper and now and then assemble those scraps. "Is it any good?" I once asked her.
She said she didn't know. "I'm young," she said. "I write poetry like someone who is young." I didn't know what she meant. I still don't.
Steven and Margie sat beside me. They'd come in through the station's front door, and each carried, literally, a brown paper bag. Steven offered me his bag. "You want a drink?"
I shook my head. "Dad's been sharing his flask. It's a bit less white-trashy than brown paper bags." I didn't offer them the flask itself.
Margie laughed and pulled her bag down to expose a Diet Pepsi. "It's your brother who's the white trash," she said. Steven showed me a can of Miller Genuine Draft.
"Where have you been?" I asked.
"We went walking," Steven said. "Up and down the streets. Not much to see around here. Kind of flat and dusty. We found a couple of body shops and a 7-Eleven. Where's Dad?"
"Back on the train, I think."
"He should've gotten a sleeping compartment," Margie said.
"We all should've gotten a compartment," I said. While the Amtrak seats were comfortable enough for sitting, they were only adequate for sleeping.
"What's with the notebook?" Steven asked.
I leafed through the Rhodia's smooth pages. "Dad found it. It's got stuff from train passengers. A mobile journal." I gave it to Margie when she held her hand out.
"A mobile journal," Margie said. "I kind of like that idea. You find anything good?"
"Haven't read much," I said. But I had read some, though I'd mostly searched for entries that had photographs or drawings. One photograph was of a long highway, with what appeared to be a dust storm in the distance. The photograph took up the top two-thirds of a page, and after it was a story titled "The Map-Reader." I liked that one--the idea of driving across the desert alone for hours and hours. But it was ideas like this that got often got between Peggy and me, too. And as I stared at the photograph, I found myself missing Peggy. "You'll always remember me," Peggy said on the our last day together as husband and wife. And she was right, too. We always do remember certain people even when they're the ones we seemingly should forget.
"You could write down your most personal feelings," Steven said.
Margie laughed. "He doesn't have personal feelings, remember?" She thumbed a couple of pages. "There's some interesting stuff. Looks like some kids got their paws on it--someone drew houses and trees with crayons." She handed it back. "If you can't think of anything to write, give it back to me. I'll write about our family's weird tradition of hauling dead relatives half-way across the country."
"Uncle Frank and Aunt Harriet were smart enough to get a sleeping compartment," Steven said.
"That's sick, Steven," Margie said.
We let the joke fade. I looked through the window to where the train was, where my father paced. He would appear on one side of the window, disappear on the other, and then reverse course. He finally stopped framed perfectly by the window, and he seemed to focus on several people who were boarding the train. It was the most movement I had seen in hours. "People are getting on the train," I said. My brother and sister didn't move, didn't even appear interested in leaving the station. "I'm going outside to see if something's happening," I said.
Outside, I asked my father if he'd heard any news. "No," he said, "but some of these people talked to a guy in a funny hat, and they talked to other people, and then the whole bunch of them got on the train."
"I'll go check inside," I said. "Maybe someone updated the chalkboard."
I had once spend an entire night in London's Victoria station. I'd missed my connection to Edinburgh, so I sat on a bench and dozed until dawn and the next train north. It was not the worst night I've spent alone, and I must have appeared sane and clean enough that nobody of authority bothered me. The timing turned out to be good, for if I had arrived in Scotland when I was scheduled to, I would not have met one of the few women I've known who could cause me to actually swoon.
The Grand Junction station was not one in which I wanted to spend even another minute, and I felt that luck had visited me because, according to the chalkboard, our departure time was just ten minutes away. I motioned to my sister and brother. "The train's leaving," I said, and they followed me outside.
"Where's Dad?" Margie asked.
Steven pointed upward. "On the train. The observation car."
Our father was sitting near a window and gesturing us to join him. "It's time to go," I said to nobody in particular.
"The engines are talking to one another," Dad said when we sat next to him.
"Family dynamics at their best," Steven said.
My father looked at me. "Where's my flask?"
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