Nana laughs. “No.”
“The burnt coffee?”
“No.”
“What, then?”
“You,” she says, and Mae smiles.
Out on the street, a red car that looks just like Garrett’s comes spinning around the corner, and for a second, Mae thinks maybe it’s him. But of course he’s already gone.
As if she can see right into Mae’s head, Nana says, “You doing okay with everything?”
This strikes Mae as funny, coming from someone who recently went through four straight weeks of induction chemotherapy for acute myeloid leukemia. But she doesn’t say so. “Yeah,” she says instead. “I’m doing fine.”
“You know, the only way to get over a broken heart is to find someone new.”
“This isn’t a broken heart, Nana. Honestly, I’m not even sure it’s bruised.” She thinks about what Priyanka said, imagining her heart packed carefully away, a tiny fence around it. Then she glances sideways at her grandmother. “Have you ever been on a train trip? Not the train to the city, but something longer.”
Nana is quiet, but her eyes have a faraway look. “I was only a little older than you,” she says with a wisp of a smile. “Maybe nineteen or twenty. A friend and I took a train to New Orleans for Mardi Gras. She had some family down there, so we went on a lark. That first morning, I met a boy in uniform, and he bought me a cup of tea. My friend barely saw me for the rest of the trip.”
Mae sits forward. “So what happened?”
“What do you mean what happened? We talked. We flirted. We kissed.”
“You did?”
“Of course we did,” Nana says impatiently. “We were in love.”
“People don’t fall in love that quickly,” Mae says, thinking this sounds suspiciously like one of the old romantic movies her grandmother loves so much.
But Nana is adamant. “They can. And we did. We spent the whole weekend together, dancing and eating and listening to jazz. We were practically giddy. Couldn’t keep our hands off each other and couldn’t stop—”
Mae hurries her along, eager to move past this description. “And then what?”
“Then we said goodbye.”
“But if you were in love…?”
“He was on leave from an army base in Texas. I had a life in New York City. It wasn’t meant to be.” She shrugs. “Love isn’t magic. It doesn’t transcend time and space. It doesn’t fix anything. It’s just love.”
“But—”
“I was in love many times before I met your grandfather,” she says. “Some of them lasted a long time; some of them didn’t. The trick is not to worry about it. If you spend too much time thinking about when it will disappear, you’ll miss the whole thing.”
“So what happened to him?” Mae asks, suddenly impatient.
“He was killed in Vietnam. But we kept writing postcards until the day he died.”
Mae is quiet, trying to decide if this is memory or imagination. It sounds like it could be true, but so do most of the stories her grandmother has told them over the years. Nana, too, is silent for a while, thinking about her soldier, perhaps, or lost in the movies that take place in her head. After a moment, she sets her mug on the table between them and turns to Mae. “So,” she says, “tell me more about this train ride.”
“What train ride?”
“The one you’re deciding whether or not to take.”
Mae looks at Nana in surprise. And then the story comes spilling out: the twinge she felt when she saw that post, and the video she sent zipping across the ocean; the way she felt when she watched her film again, like she was stuck, like she couldn’t figure out how to peer around the edges of her own life, and how it smarted when Garrett said the word impersonal; the message from Hugo W. and the questions he asked, which are still sliding around in her head like pinballs, even days later. When she’s done, Nana simply nods.
“Your fathers will never go for it,” she says, and Mae’s shoulders slump, because she knows this too. But then, to her surprise, Nana winks at her. “Which isn’t a reason not to do it.”
Mae tries to hide her smile, but she can’t. “Yeah?”
“Yeah,” says Nana, leaning forward. “You said your new roommate is from Brooklyn, right?”
Which is how, later that night, Mae comes to be sitting across from her dads at the diner—which is appropriately shaped like an old train car—and telling them that she and her future roommate, Piper, have hatched a plan to take a train to California together.
“A train?” Dad asks, lowering his BLT with a look of horror. “You do know it’s faster to fly?”
“I do,” she says. “Yes. But apparently she was gonna go with her mom, and then something came up, and she had already bought the tickets, so she needs a travel buddy.”
“You’re going to be living together in a shoebox for the next nine months,” Pop says. “Are you sure you want to start it all a week early?”
“She’s bound to find out about the snoring eventually,” Dad says, and Mae gives him a withering look. “But what if she’s terrible?”
“What if she’s great?” Mae shrugs. “Either way, it would be an experience. You’re the ones who told me I’ve got some more living to do.”
“We meant college,” Dad says. “Not riding the rails like a hobo. Will you be on the train the whole time? Like, you’ll sleep there and everything?” He glances sideways at Pop. “My back hurts just thinking about it.”
“They booked some sort of package where you get a few nights in hotels, too, so we’ll be able to see some cities along the way.” She shifts uncomfortably, dropping her eyes to her grilled cheese. She’s never lied to them about something this big. But she needs to do this, and she knows they’ll never go for it otherwise. “It’ll be fun.”
“You sure you want to leave home a week early?” Pop asks, and she can practically feel the disappointment radiating off him.
Mae’s eyes drift to the window. The sun is low in the sky, so that everything is golden, like it’s already a memory, and the old buildings with their peeling paint make the town seem charming rather than stifling, cozy instead of just plain small.
“Yes,” she says quietly, turning back to her dads. Their arms are twined now, and she knows they’re holding hands underneath the table, which only makes her heart hurt more. “That doesn’t mean I’m not going to miss you guys like crazy. But Nana will be back in the city by then, and we’ve got to say goodbye at some point anyway, and honestly, it just feels like this is one of those times where the right answer is yes.”
Her dads exchange a look.
“You’ll stick together the whole time?” Pop asks. “Day and night? You’ll look out for each other?”
Mae swallows hard. “Yes.”
“And if she turns out to be either a terrible person or a terrible influence,” Dad says, “you’ll use your good judgment?”
“Yes,” Mae says, hiding a smile.
“And you’ll check in with us three times a day?” Pop asks.
“Four,” Dad says. “No, five.”
“Yes, of course.”
Pop gives her a long look. “And you’ll stop obsessing over your film?”
She hesitates. “No promises.”
“How about thinking of starting a new one?”
“Definitely.”
“Then, I suppose,” he says with a satisfied nod, “that the right answer is yes.”
Hugo stands in the middle of Penn Station, which is not only the very worst rail station he’s ever been in but also quite possibly the very worst place, full stop. It’s dark and gray and dingy, filled with too many people and too much noise.
A police dog stops to sniff his rucksack, and when Hugo reaches to pet it, the officer snaps at him. “Watch it,” he says, and Hugo shrinks back, keenly aware that he’s in America now, and for all the warnings his mum gave him about keeping track of his belongings, it’s the ones his dad has given him over the years—about the extra layer of caution required to exist in the world when you’re half-black—that are running through his head in this crowded station.