of lit streets that the train passed in under a minute. She sat for a while with her hands in her lap, listening to the murmur of the other passengers — a drummer telling a joke, an old man explaining the stars to his wife — and felt the peculiar freedom of being unknown. Nobody here knew she was a widow. Nobody knew she had buried a husband and sold a house and was starting over at forty-seven. She was only the lady in roomette nine, and the train asked nothing more of her, and for the first time in months she fell asleep without meaning to, and woke with a crick in her neck as the train slowed for a station, and went back to her berth smiling at herself.
After dinner she walked back through the sleeping cars to Car Seven. The corridor was dim, the roomette doors closed, the sections curtained. Somewhere a baby was crying and being soothed. Avery was nowhere to be seen, but her roomette had been turned down in her absence — the seat gone, the berth made up with crisp sheets and a folded blanket, her book moved neatly to the little shelf. She had not heard him come or go. That, she thought, was the whole of his art.
She undressed in the small space, washed at the folding basin, and climbed into the berth in her nightgown, and lay listening to the rails. The train had found its rhythm, a long rocking cadence, and through the blind she could see nothing but black and the occasional farmhouse light. She slept in pieces, waking at stations she did not know, and each time the train seemed to be hurrying west as if it had an appointment. At Fort Madison, in the small hours, she woke fully and raised the blind an inch. The Mississippi was there below the bluffs, wide and black and scattered with the lights of barges, and she watched it for a long time, because she had never seen it and might never see it again, and because crossing it felt like the exact middle of everything — the old life behind, the new one not yet begun.
Friday morning she woke to Iowa. The blind was up and the world was flat and gold to the horizon, the corn stubble shining with frost, the sky enormous. She dressed, folded the berth back herself as best she could — Avery appeared at the door as if summoned, thanked her, and finished it in four practiced movements — and went to breakfast. The diner was bright with morning. She had oatmeal and coffee, and the steward told her they would be in Omaha by ten and Denver by morning, and wasn't the weather holding fine. She wrote a postcard to Clara at the table — Crossing Iowa; the sky is bigger than the postcards say — and left it with the steward to mail at the next stop.
The day unrolled in miles. The Hendersons had a table near hers at lunch and waved her over, and she joined them for coffee and heard about their grandchildren and their plans to see the Grand Canyon on the way home. In the afternoon she read her library book, a novel about a family in Maine, and watched Nebraska come on in long brown waves, the Platte glinting now and then to the south. At lunch she shared a table with a traveling salesman who talked about refrigerators for twenty minutes and then apologized for it so handsomely that she forgave him. Afterward, Avery brought her a timetable she had not asked for, folded open to the Sacramento arrival, and a second pillow, "in case the reading gets serious, ma'am." She thanked him, and he inclined his head, and she thought about how much of kindness was simply attention paid on time. The train stopped at Omaha long enough for the smokers to stretch their legs on the platform, and Martha did not get off; she had nowhere to be but here.
Late in the afternoon she walked the length of the train for exercise, as the doctor had once told her husband to do and he had not. She passed through the club car, the coaches, the diner being set for dinner, and came back to Car Seven by the far vestibule. The drawing room door was open again, and Mrs. Vance was inside with her nephew, laying out a hand of solitaire on the little table. She looked up as Martha passed and nodded, the nod of a woman accustomed to being nodded to.
"Going to dinner, Mrs. Ellison?" she said. "First seating, I hope. The second is always so crowded."
Martha had given her name at breakfast, apparently, to someone who had passed it on. "First seating," she said. "Good evening, Mrs. Vance."