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bag. She wiped her hands and then ducked into her seat and started dabbing at the splotches on her coat. I slid in after her. “I could kick myself,” I said. Even through the Styrofoam I could tell that the coffee was hot, which made things all the worse. “I hope you didn’t get burned,” I told her.
She said, “No …,” and stopped scrubbing her coat and looked over at me. In a friendlier tone, she said, “Really. I’m fine. I should have let the counterman put a lid on, the way he wanted.”
“Well, how could you have foreseen you’d be sitting next to a klutz?” I said. I passed her the cup. Then I removed the screw of soaked tissue from her hand and stuffed it into my seat pocket. “It was nerves, I guess,” I told her. “I think I’m a little nervous.”
“Nervous! About a train trip?”
I looked into her eyes. Don’t you know? was the thought I sent her, but she gazed pleasantly, blankly back at me. Her eyes were blue. Her mouth was large and well shaped, lipsticked in too bright a shade of red, and the light from the window behind her gilded the powdery down along her jawline.
I said, “I’m, ah, heading up to Philly to see my little girl on not my normal visitation day.”
“Oh,” she said. “Well, I’m sure it will all work out.”
Was this an official prophecy? No, of course not. Get a grip, Gaitlin. She took a sip of her coffee and shifted in her seat so she could pull her newspaper from beneath her. I said, “And besides!” (I was desperate. I didn’t want to let the conversation die.) “Not only is it not my normal day; I’m not supposed to see her any day, ever again.”
Her eyes came back to me. “Why is that?” she asked, finally.
“Last time I had car trouble, and I got there late, and her mother claimed it broke her heart,” I said.
Then I said, “My little girl’s heart, I mean. Not her mother’s. Lord knows, not her mother’s.”
Sophia laughed. I caught the faint scent of flowers mingled with the coffee, as if she’d been chewing roses.
“So today I’m going up blind,” I said. “I don’t even know if Opal’s going to be there.”
Which was true enough, certainly. I hadn’t given Opal a thought. I’d assumed that once I reached Philadelphia, I would turn around and catch the next train home. But I said, “Kids need their fathers. You can’t just break off ties like that.”
“You can’t, indeed,” she told me. “How old is she?”
“She’s—um—nine? Yes, nine.”
“Oh, at nine they definitely need their fathers.”
“The trouble is,” I said (for lack of any other subject), “I doubt my visits are anything she looks forward to. I’ve been seeing her once a month, is all. Last Saturday of every month. When they’re that young, they can change completely in a month! Not to mention she’s a girl. What do I know about girls? Do you have any daughters yourself?”
“Oh, no,” Sophia said. She hesitated. Then she said, “I’m not married, actually.”
I’d have been flabbergasted to hear she was, but I just said, “At least you’ve been a little girl.” (Though in fact I wasn’t so sure.) “You remember how it feels.”
“Well, but I suspect I wasn’t typical,” she told me. “I was an only child. I think that tends to keep children childlike longer, don’t you?”
“Opal’s an only child too,” I said. “Oh—sorry. My name’s Barnaby Gaitlin.”
“Sophia Maynard,” she told me.
“Sophia, if you had your say,” I said, “what would you advise a guy in my general position to do about his life?”
“I’d advise you to persevere, of course,” she said.
“Persevere?”
“Why, certainly! I can guarantee that no matter what, Opal wants to keep seeing her daddy.”
“Oh. Opal,” I said.
Actually, Opal had never called me “daddy.” “Daddy” sounded like someone else—someone who’d treat her to Shirley Temples in stodgy, flocked-wallpaper restaurants. I was starting to feel like some
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