was unfair of Mrs. Lattimore not to give her daughters the choice of being there with her while she was still able to enjoy them.
Not my decision, though. Unless I was asked a direct question by Mrs. Harald, I didn’t plan to say a word.
From far down the track, the train’s airhorn sounded absurdly like the whistle of the toy train Cal and I had given Dwight for Christmas. My stepson wasn’t unhappy about spending the week with Kate and Rob’s three children, but he was wistful about missing a train ride. At its approach, I was swept up in the same happy anticipation as the other passengers who watched the huge engine ease to a stop. No puffs of steam like the toy train, but the brakes did make a satisfactory squeal.
Soon we were wheeling our suitcases down the aisle to a pair of comfortable seats beside wide windows. Dwight stowed our things on the capacious overhead rack and snagged a couple of pillows for our necks. Legroom was at least half again what you get on a plane and there were even adjustable leg-and footrests. I know it wasn’t the Polar Express, but I could have sworn that the conductor who came around to punch our tickets looked a bit like a black Tom Hanks.
As we pulled out of Raleigh, the last call for breakfast came over the intercom and Dwight and I lurched down to the dining car, where we shared a table with a couple who had celebrated their thirtieth anniversary with a week in Florida and were now on their way back to Brooklyn. Over scrambled eggs and French toast, they gave us a list of must-do things while we were in New York. We added their suggestions to the list we’d drawn up, then they headed back to the sleeper cars and we returned to our coach.
When Dwight insisted that I take the window, I didn’t argue. I put my seat back, adjusted the pillow, and watched the landscape roll past till I fell asleep to the rhythm of the wheels. When I woke, we had stopped in Rocky Mount. Dwight’s own seat was as far back as it would go, his eyes were closed, and his long body was almost a straight line. Neither of us had slept more than four hours the night before. I’m a district court judge and my calendar had been jammed as we played catch-up after the holidays. Dwight is second in command at the Colleton County Sheriff’s Department and he, too, had put in extra hours so that he could take this week off with a clear conscience.
Carefully, so as not to wake him, I turned my head on the pillow and studied his face, a face I had known since infancy. Indeed, he was there the day I was born. Daddy had rounded up all the boys in the yard that hot August day, packed them in the back of his pickup, and hauled them over to the hospital. After eleven sons, he was so tickled to have a daughter that he’d been sure the boys would want to see me, too, whether they were his sons or friends of his sons. Dwight swears he remembers seeing me held up to the nursery window. My twin brothers don’t. “All I recall is that Daddy stopped on the way home and bought everybody ice cream cones to celebrate,” says Zach.
“First time we ever had pistachio,” says Adam.
“And it’s not like babies were real rare in our family,” Will says when the subject comes up. “But pistachio ice cream cones? Now they were few and far between.”
“Only reason I remember,” says Dwight with a teasing grin, “is that I’d tasted pistachio ice cream before, so you were the only thing new to me that day.”
Except for his height, nothing about him is particularly memorable—ordinary nose, strong jawline, clear brown eyes, straight brown hair with an obstinate cowlick at the crown.
For years, he was just good ol’ dependable Dwight, a handy escort when I was between men, a convenient shoulder to cry on when a love affair went sour, and certainly not someone who had ever made my heart flutter. Then, out of the blue, he proposed to me last year. I thought it would be a marriage of convenience for both of us, but to my complete and utter surprise, after a lifetime of taking him for granted, I found myself falling wildly in love. It was like