French Braid(3)

“Good seeing you too,” he said, and he smiled at her and then lifted a palm toward James and turned to walk away.

“Tell your family hello, hear?” she called.

“I’ll do that,” he called back.

Serena and James gazed after him a moment, although a line was already forming next to the sign for gate 5.

“I have to say,” James said finally, “you guys give a whole new meaning to the phrase ‘once removed.’?”



* * *



—

As it turned out, their train was not all that full. They easily found two seats together—Serena next to the window, James on the aisle. James unlatched his tray and set his drink cup on it. “Now do you want a soda?” he asked. “I think the café car’s open.”

“No, I’m okay.”

She watched the other passengers making their way down the aisle—a woman prodding two small children who were dawdling in front of her, another woman struggling to heave her suitcase into the overhead rack until James stood up to lend her a hand.

“He had your coloring, sort of,” he said when he’d sat down again, “but I never would have picked him out of a crowd.”

“Excuse me? Oh. Nicholas,” Serena said.

“Have you got just a huge multitude of cousins, is that it?”

“No, only, um…five,” she said, mentally counting first. “All of them on the Garrett side. My dad was an only child.”

“I’ve got eleven.”

“Well, lucky you,” she said teasingly.

“Still, I’d know any one of them if I happened to see them in the train station.”

“Yes, but we are just all so spread out,” she said. “Uncle David up here in Philly, Aunt Alice out in Baltimore County…”

“Ooh, way far away in the county!” James said, and he gave her a dig in the ribs.

“I mean, we tend to see each other only at weddings and funerals and such,” she said. She paused, considering. “And not even all of those. But I don’t know why, exactly.”

“Maybe there’s some deep dark secret in your family’s past,” James said.

“Right.”

“Maybe your uncle’s a Republican. Or your aunt belongs to a cult.”

“Oh, stop,” Serena said, and she laughed.

She liked sitting close to him this way—the armrest between them raised so that their bodies were lined up and touching. They had been going out for eight months now, but he still seemed blessedly new to her and not to be taken for granted.

The train gave a preliminary lurch, and the last of the passengers settled hastily. “Good afternoon,” a conductor said over the loudspeaker. “This is train number…” Serena took her ticket from her backpack. Outside her window, the darkened platform slid by and then they emerged into daylight; they picked up speed; crumbling concrete structures passed, every single inch of them splashed with graffiti that looked like shouting.

“So, what did you think of my folks?” James asked her.

“I liked them a lot! I really did.” She let a pause develop. “Do you think they liked me?” she asked finally.

“Of course they did! How could they not?”

This wasn’t as satisfying as it might have been. After a moment, she said, “What did they like about me?”

“Hmm?”

“I mean, did they say anything to you?”

“They didn’t have a chance to. I could tell, though.”

She let another pause develop.

“You two board in Philly?” a conductor asked, looming over them.

“Yes, sir,” James said. He reached for Serena’s ticket and handed it to him along with his own.

“My mom went all out on the lunch,” he said, once the conductor had moved on. “That chicken dish was her pride and joy. She serves it only to special company.”

“Well, it was delicious,” Serena said.

“And Dad asked in the car if I thought you’d be sticking around awhile.”

“Sticking…oh,” she said.

“I told him, ‘We’ll just have to see, won’t we!’?”

Another dig in the ribs, and a sly sideways glance.

Over dessert, his mother had hauled out the family album and shown Serena James’s childhood photos. (He’d been a cute little thing.) James had grimaced apologetically at Serena but then had hung over the album himself, alert to all that was said about him. “He ate nothing but white foods until he was in his teens,” his mother had said.

“You’re exaggerating,” James told her.

“It’s a wonder he didn’t get scurvy.”

“He seems pretty healthy now,” Serena had said.

And she and Dora had looked over at him and smiled.

Their train was speeding through a wasteland of scratchy yellow weeds and rust-stained kitchen sinks and tractor tires and blue plastic grocery bags, endless blue plastic grocery bags. “If you were a foreigner,” Serena told James, “and you’d just landed in this country and you were taking the train south, you would say, ‘This is America? This is the Promised Land?’?”

“Well, you’re a fine one to talk,” James said. “It’s not as if Baltimore’s such a scenic paradise.”