The Window Seat Ray Saved for Me

So we took the train. Not a sleeper. Coach, sitting straight up, two nights, with a paper sack of ham sandwiches my mother had made. We got off at a little station in Montana at the edge of the park and stayed four nights in a cabin that cost nine dollars a night and had a stove that smoked.

On our last day we had thirty-one dollars left.

There was a big timber lodge across from the station, with trunks of whole trees for pillars in the lobby and a dining room with a wall of windows. The dinner was six dollars a plate. For each of us. We stood in that lobby with our train tickets in our pockets and looked through the dining room doors at the white tablecloths and the people in good clothes, and we could not do it.

Ray went around to the kitchen door. I do not know what he said to the cook. He came back with one dinner roll, still warm, wrapped in a napkin, and he had paid a quarter for it.

We sat on a bench in the lobby under those enormous pillars and split it down the middle.

“Fifty years,” Ray said, with his mouth full. “Fifty years, Glen, and we come back. The right way. A sleeper car, and the dining car, and we sit at that window in there and order the whole menu.”

“The whole menu,” I said.

“Every page. And you can have the window.”

I was twenty-two and a roll tasted like a promise. I said yes.

Then life happened, the way it happens to everybody in Marlin Prairie. Three children. A mortgage. A roof. Braces, then a transmission, then Kevin’s college. Ray worked the railroad forty years, brakeman and then conductor, and on Saturdays he fixed lawn mowers and chain saws in our garage for anybody who showed up.

He never forgot the roll. Neither did I. We said it on every anniversary, over a supper I would cook, the same four words. The whole menu, Glen.

Three years before the fiftieth, he walked into Rhoda Dunleavy’s office with a coffee can.

Thirty-six payments. That is how he paid for it. Once a month, on the first Saturday, he drove to Main Street and counted tens and fives out of that can onto Rhoda’s counter. Saturday mower money. Sixty-eight dollars for a carburetor job. Twenty for a blade sharpening. Rhoda stamped a receipt each time and he folded it into his shirt pocket like it was a stock certificate. I thought nothing of it. He kept them somewhere, I knew, the way he kept everything.

He called it the Glacier fund. I called it the Glacier fund because I thought it was sweet and I did not think he would finish.

He finished. In January, he walked in with the last payment and Rhoda gave him a thick envelope. Two tickets on the train, a sleeping room both ways, six nights in that same timber lodge, and a reservation in that dining room.

We were to leave Chicago on June 2nd. Home on the 10th. Our fiftieth anniversary was June 14th.

“We’ll be back in time to have it at our own table,” Ray told me. “You can’t have a fiftieth on a mountain. People have to bring you a casserole.”