The Arrangement by Ashley Warlick

Author:Ashley Warlick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-01-18T16:00:00+00:00

Sea Change

Spring 1936

The train would be three days to Chicago, another to New York. The seats in her compartment were plush, the window wide, a berth the porter cranked down from the ceiling every night, a little johnnie in the corner with a curtain, a sink that unfolded from the wall. Each human concern fit neatly here, and twelve deep to a car, at least six cars of sleepers. It was like a tiny, efficient neighborhood, hurtling across the country.

The film of travel settled into her skin. The train rattled and swayed, loud and drafty, then blasted with heat so that her coat was always on and off her shoulders. The passengers talked endlessly about nothing, and when she went to the dining car, there was nothing she wanted to eat, and outside the window the red desert became the measureless bitter plains, the fields beaten back beneath the swollen sky, and then all was gray or darkness.

Mary Frances could hear a mother and child in the compartment next to hers, a toddler as given to words as he was to tears and thuds and crashes, and then his mother’s stroking voice. She couldn’t make out what was said; parenting remained something she spied on.

She swung over the edge of the berth and huddled in her nightgown, her bare feet dangling above the floor. During this interlude with Tim, whatever happened would be something discrete, a miniature life. She rolled her palms open in her lap and wished she had someplace to pray, someone to promise, but there was only herself. That hardly seemed like a promise she would keep.

Outside the window, the middle country raced by.

At breakfast in the dining car, she faced the mother from the berth next door, whispering to the boy as though they were alone. She bent to serve her son’s eggs, to pass the fork to his rosy mouth. There was no man traveling with them, and the woman wore no ring. Mary Frances thought of Anne, how frazzled and overwrought she would be traveling with Sean. The boy smacked his hands against the tabletop, sending spoons flying. His mother laughed, and the steward brought her more.

Mary Frances said, “Your son reminds me of my nephew.”

The woman smiled, brushing the crumbs from her lap. She spoke with such a thick accent it took Mary Frances a full moment to hear her words after she said them.

“Oh, Mum, he’s not mine. His parents are in New York a week already.”

“Oh,” Mary Frances said. “I just assumed.”

Now looking at the pair, she could chart no resemblance. But the woman beamed at the boy in a motherly fashion; she was patient, and she seemed to enjoy him.

“Have you always been his nurse?” she asked. It was too personal, but who was to say, on this train, what she should and should not do? It seemed, suddenly, important that she know.

“Since the morning he was born.”

The woman smiled at Mary Frances and turned her attention back to the boy, his fists now full of his breakfast and headed to the floor.

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