Word Count: 495
I awoke to the warm sun on my face through the train window and the bare rocking of the car as it clacked its way to the half-lost town. The view in the dawn morning was astonishing, the hills splotched with autumn color amid the dark furry green of the firs. It was incredibly beautiful, just as my mother had said.
From the window I looked down into the valleys where wet ribbons of river wound through the gradual mountains that grew as we climbed higher. I was going to see the town where I was told I was born. Where my mother had lived in the welcoming arms of family until she had me and all the strength and perseverance she’d learned against the struggles of a remote mountain village was not enough to withstand the scorn of bearing a child out of marriage. Not for herself, for she could have handled the looks and the muttering from church ladies and store clerks and former friends; for me, who she felt was born innocent and deserving of better.
Within an hour the train screeched and whistled its way to a stop. I picked up my few bags and stepped off the train onto a station platform that looked straight from something you’d see in the movies. An old cowboy western perhaps, or the dramatic loneliness of a romance where lovers are doomed to part. I asked the porter where I would find a place to stay and headed in that direction.
I registered for a room and the woman at the desk looked up quickly when I gave her my name. Could she have known my mother, have been one of her friends at the time? Or an enemy…the jilted girlfriend of the man suspected of being my father. My mother never told me his name.
I wandered through the small shops on the main street through town, reading faces, looking for places that might seem familiar through stories. The center square was just as my mother had described it, but the gazebo was shabby and the stone pavement was riddled and broken with unconcerned care. At a small diner I looked at a phone book I’d asked the waitress to see. No one with my name, though I supposed her sisters had decently married and her brother may have moved out of town.
I had planned to spend a few days there but there was a general feeling of discomfort that hung like a low-flying cloud. No one spoke to me unless directly questioned and the questions were met with a squinting of eyes and long pauses that didn’t encourage any more.
The next morning I was back on the train heading out. I never told my mother I’d been there. I never told her that there was nothing left to cling to of her past because the way she remembered it was the way she wanted it to remain.
