“How do you reckon love is like—”
“Hugo.”
“Okay, okay. I’d need to think about it more. Especially if I’m going to come up with something better than pizza.”
“You have to say it quick. The first thing that pops into your head.”
Hugo’s first thought, for some reason, is of their conversation last night, how easy it had been to talk to her in the darkness. But that’s not a word, and they’re not in love, so he turns his mind to Margaret instead, flipping through the pages of their years together, trying to find something that might sum it all up. But his mind goes entirely blank.
“This isn’t really my style,” he says with a frown. “I prefer to think things through.”
“You’re no fun.”
“You know what might help?”
“What?”
“Pizza,” he says, and when she rolls her eyes, he laughs. “Only joking. I meant coffee.”
They decide to skip the more formal breakfast in the dining car. Instead they buy a box of doughnuts in the lounge car and then find an open table to themselves. Behind them, a couple of the assistant conductors are sorting through tickets, and there’s an old man playing solitaire with a deck of Chicago Cubs cards. Otherwise it’s mostly quiet at this hour.
“So why love?” Hugo asks as he opens the box of doughnuts.
“It might be a little too early for big philosophical questions,” Mae says, raising her cup of coffee.
“No, it’s just…I understand the train part, obviously. But why love stories?”
“Because,” she says, her eyes flashing, “what could be more personal than that?” Hugo is still trying to figure this one out when she goes on. “Also, I’ve never had a chance like this before. All my films have been really small because my life has been really small. I think that was part of the problem. I mean, I once made a short about a squirrel that got stuck in our heating vents, and honestly, that squirrel was only a marginally worse actor than the drama club kids I usually put in my films. Most of them were set at the grocery store or the high school or the gas station, because there was really nowhere else. And now here I am on a train full of all these different people from all these different places, and they must have a million stories to tell.”
He considers this a moment. “So you’re taking field notes.”
“I mean, it’s not super scientific or anything, but…yeah.” She licks some powdered sugar off her finger. “I guess I am.”
“Field notes on love,” Hugo says, glancing out the window, where the world is moving by too fast.
Mae nods. “And trains.”
“Do you remember that video you did for me?” he asks, turning back to face her, and she raises her eyebrows. “Sorry. Not for me. For this trip.”
“Yeah…”
“Well, it didn’t feel small to me at all. In fact, the moment I saw it, I knew—”
She cracks a smile. “That you wanted to invite an eighty-four-year-old instead?”
He shakes his head, eager to be understood. “No. I knew there was something interesting about you. Something that made me want to meet you. And all that happened in just a couple of minutes. It was short. But you managed to say so much.”
“You asked good questions.”
“Maybe. But your answers—they meant something.” He feels his face grow warm. “Or maybe they didn’t. I don’t know. But it certainly felt that way.”
Out the window, there’s a blur of houses and trees and highways. For a while, Mae stares at the telephone lines as they zip past. Finally she turns back to him with an unreadable expression. “You’re right.”
“About what?”
“Those questions, my answers…they did mean something. They meant a lot, actually.” She smiles at him, and it’s the kind of smile that feels like a beginning—though the beginning of what, he isn’t entirely sure. “I think we should see if it might be the same for anyone else.”
They start with Ida,who tears up at the very first question.
