Page 63 of The Harvey Girls

Forty-Nine

Billie had insisted on taking the train from Williams.

They had chuckled over that. No stoplights. Barely even a road to cross.

“I’ll pay for it,” said Billie.

“I didn’t mean it like that, Grandy,” said the girl. A nickname from her first grandchild. All the little ones had called her Grandy ever since.

The girl touched her arm. Sweet as pie, she was. Whoever she was.

She looked to be in her thirties and had long silky brown hair. Like… her mother. Yes, that was it. Freddie had married a Hopi girl. This was one of their brood. But what was her name? Come on, now. Your own grandchild.

“Carrie,” said the girl.

“Pardon?”

“I’m Carrie.”

Still didn’t sound completely familiar, more like a few notes from a toe-tapping song she’d danced to a long time ago.

“It’s a nickname for Charlotte,” the girl prompted.

“Oh! Yes, of course!”

The girl laughed. “ That you remember.”

It was a marvel to Billie what she could remember. And what she could forget. The doctor had given her the news about six months ago.

“You mean senile,” she’d said.

He’d smiled uncomfortably. “We don’t use that term anymore.”

Maybe not , she’d thought. But it doesn’t care what you call it, now does it? It doesn’t care about you or me or anyone else on God’s green earth. All it wants to do is eat my brain.

They leave Carrie’s car in the parking lot in Williams—a lot that certainly wasn’t there seventy years ago when Billie first came through. Back then, whoever was rich enough to own a car just parked it along Railroad Avenue, often with the keys left right in the ignition.

The Grand Canyon Express is sleek and clean with windows that frame the arid Arizona landscape, coarse grasses sprouting from rusty-red soil dotted with ponderosa pines. And quiet—there’s so much less noise than the steam engines she rode across the Southwest all those years ago.

Billie settles back in her seat. It’s sixty-five miles to the end of the line, and even with no stops it will take over two hours to get there. It will give her time to think… and to remember. She needs to retrieve those memories before she faces the place again.

One last time.

“Happy birthday, Grandy,” Carrie says. “Is this what you wanted?”

“It’s exactly what I wanted.”

“I know you were a Harvey Girl at the Grand Canyon, but I don’t think I ever heard how you got there.”

She smiles. “That’s a long story.”

“We’ve got some time.”

She has to think.

Think, for goodness’ sake!

The older the memory, the more likely you are to keep it , she reminds herself. It’s the newer things that give her the most trouble. She gazes out the window and watches the scrim of pines against a sky so blue it nearly hums.

“It goes by fast,” she says.

“The scenery?” asks Carrie.

“All of it. Everything.”