I’d met Swan outside of Albuquerque, in a roadside bar where we stood side-by-side in a line-dancing session led by a confident instructor who wore the whole getup: knee-high boots, black Stetson, and a red hanky around her neck. A winning smile. The place itself—I could take it or leave it. A lot of spectators. Mostly bedraggled men drinking short glasses of whiskey. The décor itself was a mixed bag: dart board, stuffed coyote, video poker. Concrete floor. Sweaty bottles of Bud. Several largemouth bass hung on the wall. I was confused the entire time. My skin had stretched thin from the dry air. My lips were strips of sandpaper. I couldn’t figure out the vibe of the place. Didn’t help that it was on a lonely stretch of blacktop and attracted people from area towns plus itinerants like myself. There was supposed to be an old timey country band, but they had to cancel, so line dancing was the alternative.

I was staying in the motel next door. A two-story structure with a dry pool out back. The motel was sandwiched between the bar and a gas station on the other side. Swan and I danced next to each other. We ogled one another like kids eyeing snow cones on a ninety-five-degree day. Something about her suggested she was different from everyone else. Maybe because we were the only two without ten-gallon hats, though she had the boots and wore them like an authority on the matter. Otherwise it was faded non-designer jeans and a gray t-shirt. Sandy hair, medium length. DIY bangs. I loved every thrifty thing about her. The light in the bar grew darker, and after line dancing someone dialed up country tunes on the juke box. We fit right into each other, me and Swan, slow dancing in front of strangers to Hank Williams Senior.

She came back to the motel. Afterward, head propped up by two pillows, she said motels are the best places. She lit up right there, no concern for the smoke detector.

“As in the actual place or for the act itself?” I got up, still in my underwear, and took the battery out of the detector.

“Both, maybe.” She smoked half, then got up and snuffed it out on the rim of the bathroom sink. She saved the other half for later. “When you get up in the morning, I’ll take a coffee, no cream, no sugar, and a cake donut. Vanilla frosting. Sprinkles if they have them.”

“What are we talking about?”

“We’re talking about breakfast. I wake up with an appetite. The gas station serves decent donuts.”

“You mean tomorrow morning?”

“I mean in a few hours.”

I looked at my watch. 3 a.m. I lifted two slats in the blinds. A heavy fluorescent glow lit up the parking lot, paved in the shape of a deformed, oversized cul-de-sac. No lines for parking. This was the wild west.

How we ended up traveling together was based on the lie of her so-called dead mother’s ashes. It happened halfway through her donut when she asked me where I was headed, and I told her north and east, toward Des Moines, and she said she used to live there and wouldn’t mind visiting. Right away I got a bad feeling, and then I told her, actually I’m going to Seattle, and she said she’d never been but wouldn’t mind visiting. After I told her North fucking Dakota, and she thought that sounded okay too, I figured I was committed to taking her wherever she wanted to go. I had trouble saying no to people. Generally speaking, I avoided conflict. I was an innertube on the Lazy River of life, allowing it to spin me around, slow me down, bump me against the edges, and then dump me into whatever cesspool of piss water awaited.

She’d had a friend who once hitchhiked across the country. That friend made daily decisions by consulting the I Ching. “My mother’s ashes are my I Ching,” she told me. She was wearing nothing but an oversized red University of New Mexico Lobos t-shirt. She took the lid off the Styrofoam cup. She blew onto the top of her coffee before sipping, then added, “While you were buying breakfast, I consulted and was instructed to go. With you.”

“By your mother’s ashes?”

She nodded, bit into a donut. Sprinkles stuck to her lips.

“I guess it’s settled then.” I bit into a donut and stared at a green stain on the pillowcase and wondered if it was mine. It looked like someone had dropped a wet M&M there and left it for the duration of a feature-length film.

“Don’t worry about me,” she said. “I’m not going to fall in love with you.”

I looked at her, midbite, wishing she would’ve never uttered those words because I hadn’t thought anything remotely close to that—we were not going to be a couple, far as I knew—and here she went and dropped the L word.

“Don’t look at me like that,” she said. “You have nothing to worry about. I’ll never fall in love with a man.”

She was a good travel companion. Navigated the atlas like a pro, dialed up good tunes on the radio, and she, like me, didn’t have a smart phone, only a flip phone, and enjoyed prolonged silences—that moment of road weary hypnosis where you zone out for thirty minutes before coming to and forgetting where you are or where you’re headed. I don’t know why. I thought those moments of time were like little slices of heaven. I never liked thinking about the here and now anyway, with all the shit you have to deal with. I myself preferred to blank off every now and again. Set the cruise on the Camry and just go-go-go.

The story kept changing, but she had promised her mother that she’d take her ashes as far away from the desert as possible. She’d had several opportunities before me, but her mother’s ashes hadn’t instructed her to go until I came around. Me—I was on my way from southern California, taking the scenic route back to Des Moines for a family reunion over Easter weekend. I hadn’t seen my family in four years, and I was taking as long as possible to get there. It’s not worth explaining in detail, but the CliffsNotes version is that there’d been a falling out after, according to my father, I had a “childish meltdown” and told 95% of my family that they were idiots who belonged to a political cult, and that because of them our country was in a state of moral decay, instigated by voters with low IQs, like their own, and a lack of critical thinking skills, among several other disparaging—but not entirely false—statements. What I just explained to you was the one sentence version of the five-minute rant I went on before disappearing and not coming back to a family function until now. This was me instigating a fight and then avoiding conflict—the impossible work of being part of a family. I was living in San Clemente, tutoring kids in Math and working at my friend’s custard shop on the weekends. I was taking surfing lessons, like the Midwest-to-California cliché I’d become.

The next place we stayed was a motel in central Kansas between Dodge City and Wichita. The motel was almost identical to the one on our first night, except it was one level and painted blue and white instead of green and white. The woman at the counter sat in a recliner watching a ten-inch TV. Some car insurance commercial. A bag of Lay’s and a bottle of Coke sat on the end table next to her. Nametag said: Donna.

She looked at me. “Yeah?”

“A room, just for the night.”

Donna lumbered out of the chair. She studied with intense concentration some scribbled-on scheduler that lay on the counter mixed in with a mess of paperwork and a computer from forty years ago. Every key dirt-stained except ‘x’ and ‘z’.

After a good, long minute, I said, “It says ‘vacancy’ on the sign outside.”

“I know what the fuck it says.” She locked eyes with me, then with Swan, then back to the scheduler.

“One bed?”

“Two,” Swan said.

“Two?” Donna shot me a look.

I turned to Swan, then back to Donna. “Yeah, two,” I said.

“You’re lucky. Only got one room left with two beds. It’s available. It’s called the Sibling Suite.” She handed me a single key on a keyring.

“Could we get another?” Swan said.

Donna fumbled around with something under the ledge of the counter. Her hand emerged with one more. “Only got two, so don’t lose them both.”

I nodded.

“I like this place,” Swan said to me. She was on the bed watching baseball, but that didn’t last long.

The car ride was one thing—silent and meditative—but in the motel it was as if we were different people, absolutely mad for each other. She loved intense eye contact. The comforter was maroon, with a scratchy surface, so we piled it onto my bed and stayed in hers.

Afterward, I called Donna and asked about the nearest restaurant. Next door was a gas station that had two booths, a display of fried chicken, and a stack of old newspapers to read, but both Swan and I wanted something a little more, plus a beer or two.

Donna told us and we went. It was a buffet attached to a Casino in the middle of the desert that served the best damn crab legs I’ve ever eaten in my life. I went back for at least three helpings. Swan picked over one plate and hardly finished it. There were about ten other people in the restaurant.

“We’re smack dab in the middle of the country, and look at this.” I held up a crab leg and shook my head. I was in a deliriously good mood.

“You haven’t asked me about my name,” she said.

“I like your name.”

“It’s not my real name.”

“Then why’d you say it was your name?” I put my food down.

She moved the plate to the side.

“You gonna eat that garlic toast?” I said.

“I might in a minute.” She picked it up, pulled off a section of crust, but put it back on the plate. “My middle name is Wanda and my first name starts with S, so my mom gave me the nickname. Stephanie is my first name. I was named after a rockstar. Mom didn’t want to call me Stevie because she liked Swan more. And also she wanted me to be my own rockstar.”

“I think it’s nice.” I set my plate aside and took a sip of beer. “So you’re a musician? What instrument?”

She leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms, kind of sighed—some noise of displeasure—as if I’d asked the wrong questions.

“You want to gamble a little?” I said. “I’m not much of a gambler, but I’d be down. Since we’re here.”

“What were you doing in Albuquerque anyway?”

“I told you, I’m delaying the inevitable. Plus, I’d never been, so I thought I’d check it out. Haven’t you ever done something just for the fuck of it?”

“Your family hates you, don’t they?”

I’d told her about my outburst from four years ago. “Maybe. Probably.”

She picked up a fork, then set it back down.

“I don’t think they hate me,” I said. “Mostly, they think I’m strange because I haven’t settled down, gotten married, like my sister and all my cousins. I’m literally the only one in the entire extended family who doesn’t have kids, steady work, that sort of thing.”

“Tell me again: why are you going back?”

“Partly guilt. Partly my mother. Partly—I don’t know.”

“You could do what I’m doing.”

“The I Ching thing? Mother’s ashes?”

“Forty-five percent of the time I mostly hate myself. The other forty-five I’m trying to forget I hate myself.”

“What about the other ten percent?”

“That’s reserved for hating everyone else for not hating themselves as much as I do.”

“Misery loves company?”

“Honestly the dumbest thing you could’ve said.”

“Am I wrong?”

“That’s such a dude thing to say – am I wrong?” She pushed her plate toward me so I could eat her leftovers. “It’s not that you’re wrong. It’s that you’re missing the point.”

“The bread’s already too crusty to eat.”

“I don’t have my mom’s ashes with me.”

“Of course not. They’re back at the room, right?”

“Albuquerque.”

“Okay, what about the ‘spreading them as far away from Albuquerque as possible’ situation?”

“Before my mom died, she said I needed to do something all on my own before I could move on with my life. Do something to show I can survive. She said I hadn’t proved I was a survivor.”

“So you’re doing something for the fuck of it.”

“I’m just doing something.”

“What about this consulting thing you do?”

“I have a little vial of her ashes with me, but I’m not really consulting them. I just said that for something to say.”

“So what are you doing when you’re off thinking about stuff?”

“Do you remember the percentages I just shared with you?”

“Are we talking about gambling now?”

She threw her napkin on the table.

Back at the motel, flush with two-fifty cash from lucky slots, she changed right away into her Lobos t-shirt and then plopped onto her bed. She turned on the TV. Some Batman rerun. I took my shirt off and slipped out of my sandals. She dug around her handbag. I stood in the space between our beds, trying to figure out which one to lie on. She looked me up and down, as if trying to solve a mental problem.

Eventually, she said, “You’ll need to buy condoms at the gas station.”

I pulled my shirt back on and slipped into Tevas. On my way over, I remembered the vending machine outside of Donna’s office had the recognizable blue packaging. I hustled over the lot. A single light illuminated the area—four cars, all out of town plates, plus my own. Colorado. New Mexico. Two from Nebraska. I slipped three ones into the machine and pressed E-5. The spring twisted and the Trojans dropped into the reservoir. I fished them out, imagining how many hundreds of hands had pushed through that hardened flap over the years, that distinct clunk. I straightened up and Donna was standing in front of me.

“You finding everything okay?” she said.

“Just fine, thanks.”

She looked at my hand. I don’t know why I felt so shy about it—wasn’t doing anything illegal—but I tried to inch my hand closer to my thigh.

“How’s the Sibling Suite treating you two?”

“Just fine, thanks.”

“Okay then.” She walked around a trash can and back into her office.

By morning, we needed another package—our greatest gift to one another was being fully present in whatever moment we were in. I went out for more, and this time, when I bent down to gather them, Donna was standing next to me again, pushing one of those motel carts with the mini soaps, shampoos, freshly folded towels and wash cloths, linens. She looked at my hand again, the blue packaging.

“You sleep well?”

“Just fine, yes. How are you?”

“I’m fine, I guess.” Her lips were stained red. She kept pushing the cart to room five, whose door was propped open. The breeze caused the door to wave back and forth before banging into the wall. The dark mouth of the room swallowed Donna and her cart.

I passed my car and remembered that I had a person riding with me who had no need to be in Des Moines.

I did a quick two knocks before opening the door. “Are you still planning to travel to Des Moines?” Her head was propped up by two pillows, hand clutching the remote, legs splayed out on the sheets. Another movie whose actors I recognized, but couldn’t remember the title.

Without looking at me, she said, “My mom actually did live there.” Then she rolled onto her side to face me and, with one motion of her hand, coaxed me into her bed.

Swan asked if we could visit a park in southern Nebraska. She’d been there before, as a kid, and remembered the waterfowl and birds in the middle of nowhere, some county lake near Republican City. She’d said it was the only major water source for miles around, so all the birds and waterfowl concentrated in that spot. I remember the name of that town because I remember thinking I’d never want to live in a place named after fascists. But we stopped at the lake, and she moseyed around for a while, just sitting on benches, strolling along the lake shore. I found a gas station and bought some Gardetto’s and a six-pack of Old Style. I met up with Swan at a picnic table. We drank beer and watched robins and mallards and people meandering through the park. She liked the Gardetto’s, partial to the rye chips. She alternated between sitting, pacing, and lying on the table. When she was in that position, she said I could rest my head on her thigh and I did. Passersby gawked at us. I didn’t care. She definitely didn’t care. We were strangers to this place. The luxury of anonymity. Both of us feeling the lull of afternoon exhaustion. We didn’t move for a long time, and while people passed us, I must’ve dozed off, as I felt myself jerk awake, one of those sudden sleep tremors, and she laughed, and I laughed too. She didn’t say anything about it, just a friendly chuckle. I was happy to share the moment with her.

She said, “I don’t really hate myself.”

“I’m glad.”

“I guess I don’t understand how people can be so fine all the time. Like, doesn’t anyone ever doubt themselves, others, everything? I feel like I spend all my time overthinking everything, while everyone else just carries on like they were given some instruction manual to follow, all hunky dory, everything is as it should be. I’ve never felt like I was in a place where I was supposed to be.”

I didn’t respond because it didn’t feel like something I should respond to, and I’m thankful I didn’t, because a minute later, she said, “Anyway, I’m glad I was able to spend some time here.”

A glimmer of sun reflected off the far side of the lake. Canada geese neck deep in the shallows, fishing for food. There was a memory here in this place that Swan was revisiting. I knew well enough not to ask. If she wanted to bring it up, she would. But she never did.

We didn’t make it far that day, but we got to a Days Inn on the western edge of Lincoln. We hadn’t talked much on the drive. We collected our bags from the backseat. I could tell something had shifted. Her mood had turned. I asked her if everything was okay.

“Don’t feel like talking right now,” she replied, without looking at me.

As I checked in, she stood behind me, waiting, the strap of her handbag around her right shoulder. One backpack strap over her left.

We lay in separate beds that night. I tossed and turned. I whispered her name to see if she was awake, but she didn’t respond. The more she embraced herself, the more I could feel a distinct distance between us. I felt hungry, so I got up to hit the vending machine and saw a couple of kids sitting on a couch in the hallway, playing video games on handheld devices. The carpet looked like someone had cut it out of a mechanic’s garage and patched it onto the floor here, dark stained and greasy. I glanced at my watch. It was just past midnight. The hotel clerk was nowhere to be found. I spotted the vending machine and bought a bag of peanut M&Ms. I glanced at the kids, and said, “You were probably told never to accept candy from a stranger.”

“No we weren’t,” the little girl said.

“But we don’t like peanuts in our M&Ms,” the little boy said.

I studied the vending machine. “Well how about some Skittles then?”

They both cheered.

“Do your parents know where you are?” I asked the kids.

“Yes,” they said in unison, as if rehearsed.

I chose to believe them and bought the Skittles. They squealed with delight and ripped the bag open too aggressively, scattering candy all over the floor. They hustled to pick up every single one but, before I could say I’d buy another pack, they’d already started gnawing on the candy.

When I got back to the room, I’d noticed Swan had shifted her position. She was on her side now, facing away from me. I ate in the dark. Crunching into those M&Ms sounded like little explosions going off, so I finished the bag in the bathroom while staring at myself in the mirror. Then I brushed my teeth, but that wasn’t very satisfying because I still had the hard shell of the candy stuck in my molars. I went to bed anyway. The kids weren’t there in the morning.

We stopped in Omaha, knowing Des Moines was only two hours east, because Swan said there was a nice Irish pub in the Old Market. I hadn’t seen her eat since the rye chips in Republican City. We both ordered and ate cheeseburgers and washed them down with Guinness before strolling the streets of the Old Market. At one point, our hands touched, and we looked at each other and smiled. On the sidewalk, there was a piano tucked under the awning of a closed antique shop. She pushed down on middle C. It sounded okay. There wasn’t a sign that said otherwise, so she sat down on the piano bench. She played the opening notes to All Your Favorite Bands by Dawes. I loved that song, but didn’t really know the words except the chorus, which I sang when she looped back. After that, she played Holiday in Spain by Counting Crows and ended her three-song set with Silver Springs by Fleetwood Mac. Swan’s husky alto, adorned in a stylistic country twang, meant she sang the song an octave lower than Stevie Nicks. I was fully immersed, and impressed, as were ten strangers who made a banana curve around Swan. We all applauded afterward, and one of the guys—it’s always an idiot guy—wearing a Bass Pro hat begged for more. “I’ll pay ya,” he said. It didn’t affect Swan’s mood. We took each other’s hands and left the piano and fancied ourselves down the street before we bumped into a used record and CD shop. We ducked in and perused the collection and gawked at posters of musicians on the wall. Johnny Cash flipping us off. Mazzy Star at some outdoor festival. Swan bought Kicking Television, the double disc, and it serenaded us all the way into Des Moines.

It was late afternoon when we arrived. The sky had turned gray, and the streets and neighborhoods appeared darkened by an earlier rain.

“I don’t feel like staying with my sister and her husband,” I told Swan.

She turned the music down. “Will you go to the river with me?” She patted her handbag.

“I didn’t think you had them. I thought that was a lie.”

“It wasn’t a lie, remember? I have a few of them. Just a few. A vial.”

“So you do have your mom’s ashes?”

“Stop asking me about it, okay? I’m trying not to be a cliché. I’m not the person who travels across the country just to have a moment with their dead mother’s ashes. Will you go to the river or not?”

I turned the music down. “Will you go to the reunion with me?”

She repositioned herself in the passenger seat to face me. “Are we making some kind of deal? I hate making deals. I always get the worse end of a deal.” She clutched her handbag.

“Let’s just drive to the river.”

The river angled from the northwest to the southeast. We parked at a dive bar on the south end of town. We each had a pint of some porter on tap before walking the rest of the way to a park alongside the river. The grass was drab and the trees were just budding out. Everything was damp. I missed the warmth of New Mexico and San Clemente.

I stood next to a bench while she approached the bank of the muddy river. A narrow body of water, maybe forty feet across. Robins combed dead grass with their beaks. Her back was to me, and she stared straight ahead for a few minutes. I felt suddenly the urge to give her privacy, so I turned around. When she came back, her face was wet, but serene.

“My mom actually fell in love in Des Moines,” she said. “She always spoke fondly of the place.”

“She didn’t live here long enough to know better.”

Her face shifted. She crossed her arms. “Actually. It’s very possible I’m thinking of Des Plaines. Holy shit. Is there a Des Plaines?”

“In Illinois.”

“Fuck.” She rubbed her face and ran her fingers through her hair. “Whatever, it doesn’t matter, does it? None of this really matters.” She crossed her arms.

“It does matter.” I tried to sound comforting. I set a hand on her arm, tried to give her a hug. “It matters,” I said again. “All of this—it matters.”

She looked away while putting something into her handbag. Maybe the vial of ashes. She never told me.

“What are you going to do now?” I said.

She shrugged and pulled her quilted jacket tighter.

That night we slept in the same bed, but she’d put pillows between us while we watched one of the eight hundred Vin Diesel racing movies. In the morning, after a decent night of sleep, the pendulum had swung back, and she flung the pillows wedged between us onto the ground.

Afterward, she smoked the other half of the cigarette she’d snubbed out in Albuquerque. I removed the batteries from the smoke detector.

As we felt our time together drifting by, we talked about our lives and shared things with each other that we hadn’t up to now. Her troubled relationships. With her mother. Her absent father. Every guy she’d ever dated.

The heavy motel blinds muted the morning light. We lay in the grayness and ignored the rough sheets. She fit into the crook of my arm. Her hair smelled of motel shampoo, a hint of vanilla, maybe, and now smoke.

We both admitted that we wanted to be something more than we were: people who could make things happen for ourselves, others, the community. To matter. But it was so overwhelming to think about and to know where to begin. She said she’d never stopped dreaming of becoming a musician. I asked her to sing for me then, and she said: “Don’t ruin the moment.”

When it was finally time for the family reunion, I showered, packed, and got dressed, still unsure of her next move. But while I was getting ready, she came up with an idea.

“I could help you at the reunion.” She grinned, tapping another cigarette out of the hard pack then putting it back. “If you wait a minute, I’ll go with you.”

At the family reunion, she took me by total surprise and introduced herself as my fiancé. I had no idea until I heard her say: “We’re getting married next year. Be on the lookout for an invite. Reception only. Small ceremony.” This fabrication, this outright lie, made me in fact want to marry her. If given the opportunity again, I probably would’ve asked her to elope. Her being there had somehow been the washing away of all my family transgressions from years before. Mom, dad, sister, uncles, aunts, cousins—they all swarmed us, and I was back in the good graces of my family. Amazing how one little lie could unite us entirely. I wasn’t the liberal-asshole-sheep-snowflake anymore. I was just a kid from California. And they thought I was excelling in life. Getting married! To a beautiful young woman! My uncle said, “You’re doing what I did. Marrying up!” Wink, nod, elbow, haha. I was part of the family again. It was so easy. I could’ve never come up with something so maniacally clever on my own. I was so blissed out, so in love with the lie, and everyone’s reaction, including my own, that I hadn’t considered what would happen—all the heartbreak—when at some point in the future I’d have to tell my family that the engagement was called off. Or maybe it wouldn’t be?

Swan was an ace with my family members. She shared with them stories about how and where we met. How we danced together. How we just clicked. She withheld the timeline, but stuck to the truth of the events. I did cringe a little when she told my family that she’d stayed overnight with me at a motel the first night we met, as if that romantic passion would be embraced and shared with my extended family. But eventually, she moved on to other questions, sharing with them a little about her life—how she was an aspiring musician, but was on a break to figure things out.

For the duration of the reunion, I immersed myself in that dreamy state of being linked with her. I allowed myself to be in that space of not knowing if she was half serious or simply fabricating the entire thing for her entertainment. Or my benefit? I allowed myself, while there, to be the happy couple that we were in that moment.

We ate Maid Rites with pickles and mustard, drank a couple of Busch Lights. She played tag on the playground with kids somehow related to me. I looked longingly at my partner-to-be. I loved watching her. She moved through the reunion effortlessly, with a special kind of grace and ease.

Later, I saw her sitting on a swing and using her toe to draw shapes in the woodchips. I was in the middle of playing cornhole with my cousins, when she came over and gave me the raised eyebrows, and I knew it was time to go. We finished our game, and then Swan and I slipped out and avoided the twenty million hugs. The long Midwestern goodbye.

“You’re brilliant!” I kissed and hugged her and kissed her again, but she wasn’t giving much back.

“I need a ride to the nearest Amtrak,” she said. “It’s only like twenty miles south of here.”

“What about that story? What about… us? It’s fate, Swan. Think about it. Your mom. She fell in love in Des Moines, right?”

“Des Plaines.”

“Whatever.”

She put a hand on my elbow. “Do you remember what I told you in Albuquerque?”

And just like that—snap!—the spell had been broken. We got into the car. No music, though, because she’d already packed the double disc. We were subject to whatever was on the radio.

I waited with her until the train arrived. I purchased two coffees and we sat on hard plastic chairs in silence. She was headed back west, she said, not exactly sure where, but probably home, to Albuquerque. The train pulled into the station. Passengers bustled around, clutched their luggage, secured their backpacks, kissed and hugged loved ones. I walked her to the train entrance, but before she boarded, I said, “What am I going to tell my parents?”

“About what?”

“About my fiancé leaving me?”

She closed her eyes, shook her head, as if telling me she wasn’t here to guide the decisions in my life. That was for me to figure out.

“Stay,” I said, with a hint of desperation.

She smiled with closed lips and touched my cheek. Then she hugged me. It had meaning to it. I felt it. But it wasn’t a connecting embrace. It was a fare-thee-well embrace.

Her seat was next to the window, facing the station, so I could see her sit down and rummage through her bag. She pulled out a paperback. I thought—the entire time we sat in the waiting area together—she might change her mind and stay, because I had gotten caught up somewhere in the story about us being together. But I did ask her to stay, and she looked disappointed with the question, and that look of disappointment is probably what haunts me the most.

The one thing she did share with me, as we waited for the train, was that, quite simply, she wanted, now, to be on her own—to have the mental space to start making her own decisions. This pilgrimage of sorts, she said, was something she needed to do for both her and her mom, to move on. But mostly for herself. To be someone in this world who she wanted to be.

As the train lurched forward, she turned quickly, as if finally remembering that I was there to see her off. I had one last hope that maybe we’d have our own movie scene: she’d stop the train, come running out, and we’d fling ourselves into each other’s arms. We’d embrace and kiss to the sound of strangers clapping and cheering for us—strangers inspired by our irresistible love for one another. But instead, she scanned the crowd and acted as if she couldn’t find me, until she did. As the train left the station, our eyes met and we held each other’s gaze for as long as possible. At the last possible second, as if trying to think of some way to acknowledge me, she gave me the peace sign, like we were some idealistic kids from the 60s—a gesture to show that, at least for a little while, we had something in common. Something that unified us. Something we shared together.

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Keith Pilapil Lesmeister is the author of the forthcoming story collection Ask Me About the Money (Cornerstone Press, Fall 2026). His most recent work appears or will appear in the Bennington Review, december magazine, Jabberwock Review, North American Review, South Dakota Review, and elsewhere. He’s fiction editor at Cutleaf Journal. More info at keithlesmeister.com

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