was a large chalkboard listing arrivals and departures by their destination or city of origin: the smaller towns up north, and Boston and New York, but also Chicago and even Los Angeles. From this tiny station a person might go anywhere, Joe realized, board a train and vanish down the long corridors of the continent. Amy changed the baby on the sofa, then warmed a bottle for him on the hot plate while Joe rinsed out the dirty diaper in the washroom sink. By the time he returned to the office, the diaper wrapped in newspaper, the woman had made tea. In the wintery light of the room’s tall windows her face had taken on a pale glow. She had large, damp eyes and hair the color of dry wood, blond gone not quite gray. She handed him a cup, gingerly, so as not to spill any of it into the saucer. While Joe sipped his tea, from the top drawer of her desk she removed a small framed photo and gave this to him also.
“This is my boy,” she said. “Earl junior.”
Joe put down his cup and accepted the photo. A young man in an undershirt and jeans, his chest and stomach washboard-thin, with fading stains of acne on his prominent cheekbones: he stood astride a bicycle and was leaning slightly forward, his arms surprisingly muscular where they were draped over the handlebars, his eyes and face squinting in a cockeyed half-smile for the camera. Joe could see something of the boy’s mother in his face, the angles of the bones and the slightly too-long distance between his nose and upper lip. His hair, too, was a Nordic blond—the color hers had been, Joe guessed. It was not, on the whole, a degree of likeness that one would notice right off—it was more suggestion than resemblance—though probably people had always said how much he looked like her.
“We called him Skip, so’s not to confuse everyone. He never did like that.” She shook her head distantly; talking about her son, part of her went someplace else entirely. “I took this in forty-two, the summer before he went into the service.”
Joe held the photograph another moment before passing it to Amy, who nodded without expression and returned it to the woman.
“What unit did you say he was with?” Joe asked.
The woman raised her head. Her voice was proud. “Eighty-second Airborne. The 509th.”
So, Joe thought, the boy on the bicycle had jumped out of planes. Fantastic, how the war had made such things possible; before those days, Joe himself had never even held, much less fired, a gun. He thought again of the woman’s son—how strange it must have been for him, one minute to be diving off the rocks into an ice-cold quarry lake, trying to impress his friends or a girl who sat on a blanket nearby; the next to find himself in the belly of a C-47 with a hundred pounds of gear strapped to his frame, the cabin pitching and rocking in the dense, violent air, ready to hurl himself out the door into a sky lit up by antiaircraft fire, over a country he had read about in social studies but might have gone his whole life without seeing. And yet he had died there: at Salerno, the 509th had dropped behind German defensive positions, straight into a Panzer Division. Or at least that was what Joe remembered hearing. The ones that had made it to the ground had been cut off for days, some without so much as a weapon. There were always stories like this. In the confusion, Joe had found it best to simply believe all of them.
“I knew some Eighty-second guys. Everybody said they were the toughest.”
The woman returned the photo to its place in her desk. “Well.” She cleared her throat. “I don’t know about tough.” She sat on the sofa next to Amy and the baby. The little boy’s face was watchful and contented, as it always was after he’d been changed. “How old is your son?”
“Seven months,” Amy replied.
Amy had undressed the baby to change him; his feet were bare. The woman bent her face toward him and took his feet and placed their soles against her lipsticked mouth. She pursed her lips and hummed a little tune; the baby laughed, his eyes darting around the room, searching for the source of these wonderful sensations.
“You like that?” the woman asked. She blew, hard, into the soles of his feet. The