The Window Seat Ray Saved for Me

I asked myself one question.

What do I actually want?

It was not the lodge. I knew that right away, and it surprised me. I did not want to go and sit in the dining room alone, and Kevin was right about that much, and I hated that he was.

I wanted June 14th.

I wanted my fiftieth anniversary to be a thing that happened. The date was going to arrive whether anyone said anything or not, and the only question was who would be in the room when it did.

Thursday morning I did something I had not done since the funeral. I put on my good blue blouse and I drove to Judy’s Depot Diner at six-thirty.

Every Thursday for nineteen years, Ray had eaten breakfast with a handful of retired railroad men in the back booth. They called themselves the Thursday Liars. After the funeral they kept his stool open at the end of the booth. Peg Oakes told me. I had never gone to see it.

The back booth went quiet when I came in.

Woody Oakes stood up. He is seventy-six, and he was Ray’s engineer for twenty-two years, and he has a face like a creased glove. “Glenys,” he said. “Sit. Sit anywhere.”

I sat in Ray’s spot. Judy brought me coffee without asking.

I told them the whole thing. I read it out like a grocery list: the coffee can, the call to Rhoda in April, the pie, the photograph of the lobby, what Kevin said on the phone. I did not raise my voice. I have never had much of a talent for that.

When I finished, nobody picked up a fork.

Bud Ferris, the barber, whose magazine had started the whole business in 1975, took off his cap and put it on the table.

Woody looked at his hands for a while.

“Glenys,” he said at last, “when’s your anniversary again?” He knew perfectly well.

“June 14th. Saturday.”

He nodded slowly. Then he looked around that booth at six old men in feed caps, and I saw something pass from one face to the next, the way a signal goes down the track from one lamp to the next.

“How many people,” Woody said, “do you suppose the depot waiting room will hold?”

I did not know what he meant. I thought he was being gentle. I thought a few of them might come by the house with a cake, and I went home and let the day go by.

At a quarter to nine that evening, Rhoda Dunleavy called. Her voice had changed. It was low and rough.

“Glenys. I couldn’t sleep, so I went back to the office and pulled Ray’s original file. I never read all of it, with Kevin on the phone, and I just…” She swallowed. “There’s a note clipped to the front of the reservation, in Ray’s handwriting. It’s from November. After his stent.”

“What does it say?”

“I’ll read it exactly. It says, Both seats are Glenys’s, whatever happens. If I can’t go, she goes anyway. Woody rides with her if she wants somebody. R. Birkett.”

I did not say a word.

“He handed it to me over the counter and I clipped it on myself,” Rhoda said. “He said, Just in case, Rhoda. Don’t make a fuss. And I forgot. I have never in thirty-one years forgotten a thing like that. I’m so sorry.”

I sat very still.