“My mom’s having hip trouble too,” Serena told Nicholas. “Maybe it’s genetic.”
“Your mom is…Alice?”
“No, Lily.”
“Oh, right. Sorry. But it was you I sat next to at Grandfather Garrett’s funeral, I think.”
“No, that was Candle.”
“I have a cousin named Candle?”
“You guys!” James said, disbelievingly.
“Kendall, her name is really,” Serena went on, ignoring him. “She just couldn’t say her own name when she was learning to talk.”
“You were there, though, right?” Nicholas asked.
“At the funeral? Oh, yes.”
She’d been there, but she’d been twelve years old. And he had been, what? Somewhere in his mid-teens; a world of difference back then. She hadn’t dared to exchange a word with him. She had studied him from afar as they all milled in front of the funeral home afterwards—his self-contained expression and his pale gray eyes. The eyes came from his mother, Greta, a standoffish woman with a limp and a foreign accent, or at least a not-Baltimore accent. Serena remembered those eyes very well.
“We were supposed to go to lunch with everyone after the service,” Nicholas was telling her, “but Dad had to get back for a school play.”
“Speaking of getting back…” James interrupted. He jabbed a thumb toward the board above them. “We should head to gate 5.”
“Oh, right. Okay, we’d better be going,” Serena told Nicholas. “I’m so glad we ran into you!”
“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.