Dinner was at the first seating, because Martha had learned on the westbound trip that she preferred it, and the dining car was full of the particular contentment of a train well into its run. She ate alone at a table for two and watched the Sierras come up outside the windows, darkening as the light went, and thought about the mountains on the other side of the trip — the Rockies she had crossed twice now, once as an accused woman and once as a guest, though no one at the neighboring tables knew either of those things about her, and she liked that. She liked being unremarkable again. She had been unremarkable for forty-seven years before one October night, and she had earned it back, and it fit her the way her own coat fit her.
After dinner she sat in the observation lounge for an hour with a magazine she did not read, watching the dark go past, and the train climbed, and climbed, and the engines worked harder, and somewhere beyond the glass the mountains stood in their black ranks the way they had stood a year ago. She thought about Emma's waiting room, and the stove, and the wire beginning to tick. She thought about Mr. Cobb's chit book, and Dot crying two berths away and then giving her statement clearly, and the Hendersons with their written pages. She thought about Thomas standing in a vestibule saying what a berth had held at six o'clock, and what it had cost him to say it, and what it would have cost him not to. She thought about Mr. Pruett at the telegraph desk in Denver, writing his own name under an apology. Ordinary people. Ordinary records. That was the whole of it, and it had been enough, and she hoped she would remember, when she was old, that it had been enough.
She had not expected Mr. Pruett on the platform, and she had not expected the way her throat had closed when he took her ticket himself. Thirty years on the run, and he had walked her to her car like a man making amends the only way his profession allowed — with the punch, the steps, the corridor, the door. She wondered if he thought about that October night, and decided he must, the way she thought about it: not every day, but on certain dates, the way old injuries ache before rain. The date on her own ticket had been chosen on purpose. She wondered if he had noticed. Conductors notice everything. She picked up her magazine again, and this time she read it, or pretended to, while the mountains kept their black ranks outside the glass, and the train climbed on through the dark toward the morning.
At ten there was a knock at her roomette door — two soft raps, the porter's knock — and Martha called, "Come in," and Thomas stepped halfway in with the bedding over his arm, and made up the berth with the practiced economy of a man who has done it ten thousand times, and wished her good night, and was gone. Martha undressed in the little washroom, and hung up her suit, and got into the berth, and lay listening to the train climb through the night, and slept the deep untroubled sleep of a woman with nothing to prove.
She woke once, near midnight, to the train slowing for a station she could not see, and lay in the dark listening to the brakes and the distant clank of the platform, and then the train moved on, and she slept again.
She woke before the knock, in the blue hour before morning, to the train running easier on flatter ground, and lay in the berth listening to the rhythm change the way she had learned to listen a year ago — Chicago to Sacramento, two nights and a day, the plains and the mountains — only now the rhythm was carrying her east to Dayton, to papers and a storage room and the last of a life she had already lived. The blind showed a line of pale sky. Somewhere ahead the dining car crew would be laying the white cloths for the first seating. She thought about Emma, up at her desk at Alder Creek at this hour, nineteen years of mornings, the key ticking. She thought about Clara's roses. She thought about fifty-six children, and whether Tommy was doing his long division. Then the knock came — two soft raps — and she smiled in the dark, because of all the sounds a train makes, that one was now her favorite.
And Thomas's voice through the door, respectful and unhurried: "Good morning, Mrs. Ellison. Will you be taking breakfast at the first seating or the second?"
Martha smiled in the dark of the berth, because of all the questions she had been asked on trains, this was the only one that had ever been only about breakfast.
"The first seating, Mr. Avery," she said. "Thank you."
"Very good, ma'am," he said, and the door closed gently, and the train went on through the morning with everyone in their right names.