Make a Scene
The air-conditioning died twenty minutes outside of Boston.
I felt it before anyone said anything. A shudder in the vents above the windows. A long mechanical sigh. Then silence where the hum had been.
At first, nobody noticed.
Then the heat started creeping in.
It was the third week of July. Ninety-one degrees outside. The Northeast Regional to New York. Train 171. Four hours and nine minutes, Boston South Station to Penn Station, if nothing went wrong.
Something always goes wrong.
I had a window seat.
Car 5. Seat 43A. Facing forward. I’d booked it three weeks ago, the night the hospice nurse called.
I had a canvas tote at my feet with a cardigan I wouldn’t need, a paperback I wouldn’t read, and a Tupperware container of lemon bars for my mother, who couldn’t eat them anymore.
I was going anyway.
The carriage got hot fast.
By Route 128, people were fanning themselves with the Amtrak safety cards. By Mansfield, a baby three rows back was crying. Steady. Furious. A woman across the aisle had taken off her blazer and was pressing a cold water bottle to the back of her neck.
A man in the front of the car went to find the conductor.
He came back five minutes later.
“They know,” he announced. “They’re working on it. They say maybe Providence.”
People groaned.
Every seat was taken. Every single one. A Friday afternoon in July. People going to New York for the weekend. People going home. I’d looked when I boarded. There wasn’t an empty seat in Car 5, or Car 4, or Car 6.
There was nowhere to move. 