The Art Room in the Old Depot

Lyle worked for the Chicago and North Western for thirty-one years, brakeman and then conductor, and for the Union Pacific for ten more after they bought it. He is eighty-one. His wife, Marge, died three years ago in March. He lives two blocks from the depot, and most days he walks down and unlocks it and sits in there a while.

His pickup was out front. I pulled in beside it.

He was in the waiting room, in a kitchen chair next to the potbelly stove, which was not lit, it being ninety degrees. He had the newspaper. The benches were still there along the walls, the old oak ones with the iron armrests so a man could not lie down on them. The ticket window still had its brass bars. The light came in through those tall windows the color of weak tea, and the whole place smelled like dust and creosote and a hundred years of floor wax.

“Mrs. Lindholm,” he said. “You lost?”

“I bought a kiln,” I said.

He folded the paper. “Did you.”

I told him. I had not planned what to say, so it came out all at once: the vote, the forty dollars, the eleven banana boxes in my basement. I said I wanted to open an art room on Saturdays for any child who wanted to come. I said I needed a big room with good light and a concrete floor somewhere for the kiln, and that I would pay rent.

He listened to all of it. Then he got up, slowly, with one hand on the stove, and walked me through the door behind the ticket office into the freight room. It was long and bare, with a big sliding door on the track side and a floor of poured cement where they used to stack cream cans.

“That do for your oven?” he said.

“That would do.”

“Then go on and use it. I’m not using it.”

“What do you want for rent, Lyle?”

“I don’t want anything. It’s kids.”

“I want to pay.”

He looked at me a while. He has pale eyes and the kind of patience you get from thirty years of waiting on sidings for another train to pass.

“Why?” he said.

“Because if it’s a favor, it can end with a thank-you,” I said. “I’ve had enough of being thanked this year. If I pay, it’s mine on Saturdays, and nobody gets to tell me I’m welcome in it.”

He thought about that. He looked up at the ceiling as though the figure were written there.

“The light bill and the insurance come to about that much a month,” he said. “Hundred and fifty.”

“A hundred and fifty.”

“First of the month. And I’ll likely sit in there. I sit in there anyhow.”

“I’d be glad if you did.”

We shook on it. His hand was dry and enormous.

I told Tom at supper. I had braced for it, because a hundred and fifty dollars a month is not nothing to us, not with my paycheck gone and only my sub days coming in. He chewed his pork chop.

“What’s the service in that building?” he said.

“I don’t know what that means.”

“I’ll go look.”

That is my husband. He was not at the microphone in April because I asked him not to be, and it cost him something to sit still. He had been waiting four months for a thing he could do with his hands.