"I know you are."
James looked from one to the other. He understood, then, more or less, the shape of it. The bracelet said CALL PETRA, and here was Petra, red from hat to sneakers, and the old woman on his arm did not know her name. Knew she played the piano, knew she helped, knew she came in red. But not her name. Not, he thought, that this was her granddaughter. He thought about what it would be like, to run across a train station toward someone you loved and watch her look at you like a pleasant stranger, and he found he did not want to think about it very long.
"Let's sit down," Petra said. "James has had a long trip. Haven't you, James?"
"Long trip," James agreed. "Real long. Let's sit."
They walked Iris to the nearest bench, the three of them moving at Iris's speed, which was the speed of a slow procession. James carried the suitcase in his free hand. It bumped his calf with each step and the papery slither inside it went back and forth. Iris sat in the exact middle of the bench and patted the wood on either side of her, and James sat on one side and Petra on the other, and Iris put her gloved hand on James's knee and left it there with a little proprietary pat, and looked up at the skylight again and sighed with contentment.
"The four-ten," she said. "You came early."
"I did."
"You never come early. You came early." She shook her head in happy amazement. "The army changed you."
Over her head, Petra mouthed: Thank you. And then, still silent, two more words he couldn't read. He raised his eyebrows. She leaned back so that she was looking at him behind Iris's hat and said, very softly, "Nineteen sixty-one."
He nodded as if this were information he could use.
"He was in Germany," Petra murmured, while Iris hummed something under her breath and tapped her foot. "Berlin. The year the wall went up. He came home that December on the train from New York, and she met him here. In this room. She was twenty-two. She waited tables at the lunch counter down in the concourse." Her voice was flat and quick, the voice of someone who had recited this to doctors and social workers until the feeling had been sanded off it. "They were married fifty-three years. He died in twenty-fourteen. She has Alzheimer's. Middle stages, they keep saying, like it's a road trip. She lives with me in Berwyn. And about once a month, on a Saturday, she gets up from her nap and packs that suitcase and walks to the Metra and gets on the BNSF and comes here to meet him off the four-ten." She stopped. "There is no four-ten. There hasn't been a four-ten since before I was born. I looked."