She slept the way she had not slept since Chicago. No dreams that she remembered. No waking to check the lock on a door. Only the sound of the rails underneath her, steady as a pulse, carrying her west through the dark toward the morning, and the knowledge, settled somewhere below thought, that the wires had gone ahead of her and the crews knew her name, and that this time the train was on her side of the argument.
Utah came at dawn, and it came the way Martha would always remember the West coming: all at once, and lit from underneath. She woke to a different motion in the rails and a different light through the blinds, and raised the shade on the great salt flats going past in the early sun, white to the horizon, with the lake beyond it hammering light back at the sky. She had never seen anything so empty and so full at the same time. She stood at the drawing-room window in her robe with her coffee — the porter had left it outside the door at six, with a card that said the dining car would serve breakfast until nine — and watched the desert go by, and thought about Dayton, Ohio, which was green and close and full of streets that knew her, and understood that she was not sorry to have left it, and that this did not make her disloyal, and that she was forty-seven years old and allowed to learn this now.
By midmorning the train was running through country so wide it made her think of the ocean, which she had never seen. She took out a sheet of her good stationery and began the short letter to Emma, because the long one would need the classroom and the street in it, and those did not exist yet. She wrote about the salt flats and the light. She wrote that the drawing room was absurd and that she was keeping the napkin. She wrote that she had slept. Three sentences about sleep, because it seemed important to say it plainly: she had slept through the mountains in a bed made up by hands she never saw, and woken to Utah. She folded the sheet into her handbag to finish in Sacramento.
The dining car at the second seating was quieter than it had been on Friday night, or perhaps she was quieter. She sat alone at a table for two and ate eggs and toast and drank two cups of coffee, and the steward — a man she did not know, on the westbound crew — refilled her cup without being asked and did not look at her twice, and she understood that this was what it was like to travel as an ordinary passenger, unremarkable and unremarked, and that she had not known until this trip how much of her life she had spent being unremarkable without ever noticing the luxury of it.
Sunday went past in Nevada, which was brown and enormous and honest about being both. Martha read her library book — she was nearly finished with it, and the ending, when it came, was the one she had expected, which satisfied her. She wrote in the little notebook she carried for school notes, though she was not teaching yet: the names of the stations, the color of the light at noon, the way the sagebrush looked from a moving train. She ate Emma's sandwiches for lunch, sitting in the drawing room with the door open to the corridor, and a child went past in the corridor twice, running, and was called back twice, and Martha smiled both times.
That night she slept again, deeply, and woke on Monday morning to the train slowing through country that was green in a different way than Ohio was green — orchards, in rows, and then houses, and then a city. Sacramento. The porter knocked and told her they were twenty minutes out, and she dressed carefully in her best suit, the one she had worn to board at Chicago four days before, and packed her suitcase with the particular neatness of a woman who has learned that a packed suitcase is a kind of argument. The basket from Emma was empty now except the thermos and the napkin, washed and folded. She kept the napkin. She would keep it always.
Clara was on the platform. Martha saw her through the window before the train had stopped, standing very still among the moving crowd with her hands clasped in front of her, the way she had stood at every important moment of both their lives — their mother's funeral, Martha's wedding, the day the telegram came about Martha's husband — and Martha's eyes filled, and she did not wipe them, because there are times when a woman of forty-seven is entitled to get off a train crying. The conductor — Mr. Hale — helped her down himself, and the porter brought her suitcase, and Clara came forward, and the two sisters held each other on the platform at Sacramento on the morning of Monday, October the twentieth, 1952, while the Limited stood behind them breathing steam, and neither of them said anything at all for a full minute, which was exactly right.