“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.”
“No, I just meant…I was talking about the whole Amtrak route,” Serena said. “The Northeast Corridor.”
“Oh.”
“I didn’t realize it was a competition,” she said in a joking tone.
“Oh, I know how uppity you Baltimoreans are,” James said. “I know how you guys sort people out by what high school they attended. And then marry someone from your high school in the end.”
Serena made a big show of looking to her right and left. “You see anyone from my high school sitting here next to me?” she asked.
“Not at the moment,” he admitted.
“Well, then!”
She waited, curious to see what he would say next, but he didn’t pursue the subject, and they traveled awhile in silence. Behind them, a woman with a soft, coaxing voice was talking on her phone. “So how are you really?” Serena heard her say. And then, after a pause, “Now, hon. Now, sweetie. Go ahead and tell me what’s wrong. I can hear there’s something.”
“Just look at poor Nicholas,” James said all of a sudden. “His dad moves him away from Baltimore, and so the rest of the family stops speaking to them.”
“That’s not us doing that!” Serena said. “It’s them. It’s Uncle David, really. My mom says she can’t understand it. He used to be so outgoing when he was a little boy, she says. Aunt Alice was kind of a killjoy but Uncle David was one of those sunshine children, all happiness and glee. And now look: he left early from his own father’s funeral.”
Grandfather’s funeral, Nicholas had called it: “Grandfather Garrett’s funeral.” But Pop-Pop had never been “Grandfather”！ How could Nicholas not have known that?
“And then your aunt,” James went on. “The farthest she moved was Baltimore County, but oh, no. Oh, no. Never going to speak to her again.”
“Don’t be silly; we speak to her all the time,” Serena said, exaggerating only a little.
She didn’t know why she felt so defensive. It was the stress, she supposed. The stress of meeting his parents.
When the subject of this trip had first come up, the idea was that they’d go for a weekend. James had talked about where they could get the best Philly cheesesteaks, and whether she’d like to visit the art museum. “You’re going to love the Chamber of Horrors,” he’d told her.