The Window Seat Ray Saved for Me

I carried a rhubarb pie into Dunleavy Travel on a Tuesday morning to thank Rhoda Dunleavy for cancelling the $9,400 anniversary trip my husband paid off before he died, and she asked me, so kindly, whether the kids had texted from the train yet.

I stood there with the pie in both hands.

It was still warm. I had taken it out of the oven at six.

“The train,” I said.

“The Empire Builder,” Rhoda said. She was smiling at me the way you smile at somebody who is being brave. “They left Chicago yesterday afternoon. Kevin said they would be pulling into East Glacier tonight around ten. Oh, Glenys, I think it’s lovely. Ray would be so glad it got used.”

I set the pie down on her counter beside the little brass bell.

I did not feel anger. Anger needs a floor to stand on, and the floor had gone out from under me. It was the way you feel at the top of a staircase when you reach for a step that is not there.

“Rhoda,” I said. “Who changed the names?”

Her smile stayed on her face a second longer than the rest of her.

“Kevin called me in April,” she said. “He said you wanted the tickets used. By the children, in their father’s memory. He said you could not face the trip yourself and you asked him to handle it. I changed the names to his and Dana’s. There was a fee. He paid it.” She stopped. “Glenys, you did say that. Didn’t you?”

I had said nothing. Nobody had asked me.

My voice went small and flat the way it had in the hospital hallway in March, when the doctor came out with his hands folded. “No,” I said. “I don’t believe I did.”

Rhoda has sold travel in Marlin Prairie, Illinois, for thirty-one years. She has booked every church trip and every honeymoon I can remember. I watched her sit down as if somebody had taken her knees.

“He sounded just like Ray,” she whispered. “On the phone. I heard Ray’s boy, and I heard Ray, and I did not think.”

Then she started to cry, and I did what I do in a kitchen when something spills. I looked for a rag.

I brought her the tissues from the file cabinet. I cut the pie with her letter opener, and the two of us ate rhubarb pie at nine in the morning at a travel agency counter while the phone rang and neither of us answered it.

“I should have called you,” she said.

“You should have,” I said. “And I should have asked my son a question in April. We were both busy being kind.”

I left her the rest of the pie.

I drove home the long way, past the grain elevator and the water tower and the depot, and I did not call Kevin. I did that on purpose. I wanted to find out what I would say if I waited.

Let me tell you what that trip was, because it was never a trip.

Ray Birkett and I were married on a Saturday, June 14th, 1975, in the Methodist church in Marlin Prairie. I was twenty-two. He was twenty-four and had been on the railroad for six months, braking freight for ten dollars a day more than anybody else we knew was making.

We had a wedding supper in the church basement and about three hundred dollars between us. Ray had read an article in Bud Ferris’s barbershop about Glacier National Park, and neither of us had ever seen a mountain.