Adrienne and I were having breakfast at the table. She was telling me about her grandfather. “Well,” she said, deftly stitching a button onto her teal blazer. “He’s always told us these amazing stories about his life. He loves to tell them. He’d definitely talk to you. He’s been telling them to us since we were kids and we’re always like, ‘We know Grandpa.’ But that’s just because we’ve heard them so many times. He’s done some real interesting things. He invented the electric toothbrush.”

“Really?” I said. I leaned forward and lit a cigarette. Adrienne left the table and waved her hand through the smoke, continued to explain Elmer’s achievements while she washed dishes at the sink.

“Yeah, and the first battery powered watch. He did both of those while he was at Elgin Watch Company. He invented the wedding registration too.”

“The wedding registration?” I said.

“Yup,” she said. She turned off the water and dried her hands on a dishtowel. “At Marshall Fields in Chicago.”

“But what do you mean he invented the wedding registration?” I asked.

“You’ll have to ask him,” she said. She draped her arms across my chest and cuddled her chin into my shoulder. “I think we should go and you should interview him. It could be a road trip, although I don’t want to take my car. Let’s take a train. Come on, it’ll be adventurous. And if we go down there you’d get to meet my father.” 

Adrienne and I had been dating for seven months. We were in love, and spent afternoons sprawled in bed as the seductive dusk tinted the windows. I had met her mother, with whom I shared an affinity for literature, but her father was a man who was not accessible, a man who would undoubtedly criticize my nicotine-stained teeth, and a man who invoked trepidation when I considered visiting south Florida. Adrienne was nervous too. I could not help but notice the tension that formed in her face as she imagined our meeting. Her father was an esteemed dean of dentistry at a university in south Florida, an ex-race car driver, and the owner of a sturdy and handsome physique, with teeth, in their sixth decade, which made mine appear to have descended from nineteenth century London.

“Do you want to go next month?” Adrienne called from the computer.

“Alright,” I said, stubbing out my cigarette and using my tongue to swab the coffee from my teeth.

 She came into the kitchen and said, “It’ll be eleven hours on the train. But we can handle it.” She was wearing her teal blazer and a camouflage wife-beater. She stood next to the window and let the sun fall into her eyes. She blinked dreamily, sifting through the images of us on a train. “It’ll be interesting, don’t you think?”

A month later, we carried our bags to the taxi as the last layer of darkness peeled back from the morning sky. The air was moist, moving, and mysterious, with a sinister quality that reminded me of mornings in San Francisco, and the taxi-driver’s face was somnolent, sallow, and staunch, with a grimy quality that reminded me of hangovers. On the deserted highway he said, “Aren’t you a little early for the train?”

“No,” Adrienne said. “It’s coming at five.”

 “Did you call to make sure it was on time?”

 “No.”

“Well, those things are notoriously late,” The taxi-driver had an indistinguishable accent that, with this new information, irritated me. I reassuringly rubbed Adrienne’s thigh.

“It’ll be there,” I whispered. 

“I bet it seems I’m going fast, huh?” the taxi-driver asked. “But I’m barely going the speed limit. You always get there faster when you’ve got time.” Our eyes met in the rear-view mirror. He turned and showed me a crooked, creepy smile. When he dropped us at the train station he said, “You kids have good luck.” And then he sped away, leaving us in a wake of exhaust that seemed to laugh at our foolishness.

The short middle-aged woman behind the counter checked our ID’s and stamped our tickets. At the last possible minute, she said, “Your train’s not coming ‘til 9:30.” It was five a.m. We stood at the counter and watched the woman move to her next task. I wanted something, compassion, or the woman to acknowledge her joke, but all I got was the sudden realization that traveling by train held much more allure when rolling across the sunny hills of imagination.

The waiting room was crowded. People sprawled across the blue plastic chairs with their heads pillowed on their packs, couples leaning on the other’s shoulder, disheveled businessmen raking their fingers through their snarled hair, and conservative women patiently checking their watches. Adrienne and I sat on our jackets and settled in for the wait. At the front of the room, perched atop a table, a giant television delivered the morning news. It was the twentieth anniversary of the Challenger’s space shuttle tragedy. I looked at the images of the astronauts and said, “God, I remember that. Twenty years ago.” It was the first time in my life I could say that, and I felt very much like an adult.