“Er . . . How would you feel about your only son hopping the border for a couple days?”

Eighteen

The train comes to a stop twenty minutes ahead of our expected arrival time, which is still a good ten hours and fifteen minutes after leaving Penn Station this morning. Seven p.m. and Montreal is already dark, and my muscles feel sore from the swallowed day of travel.

I barely have time to wake up from my post–US-Canada border nap to find Corinne already looming over me, bag under her arm.

“Are the gendarmes searching the train?” I ask, midyawn. “Why are you in such a hurry?”

“I’ve been sitting for ten hours. I could run a marathon,” she says, dragging me to the front of the train. She seems committed to our being the first ones out. “Aunt Terry is meeting us a few blocks away. She didn’t want to pay for parking.”

“Slow down, will you?” I shout out in the brouhaha of tourists and cross-country travelers pouring out of the Amtrak 69 train and into Montreal, still carrying that New York quickstep in their walk.

I don’t know what I was expecting, but so far, the population of Montreal isn’t all that different from New York’s. No Mounties to speak of yet. Visually, the ethnic breakdown of the crowd definitely tips in favor of white people, but there are still plenty of shades and shapes and ethnicities to be found.

The crowd may even skew a little younger—according to Wikipedia, there are eleven colleges and universities in the Greater Montreal area. As a whole, though, Montrealers are just as fashionable as New Yorkers.

“Keep up, Haltiwanger!”

As we make our way out of the Gare Centrale station, Corinne defaults to tour-guiding mode. Her style is a mix of casual factoids, circumstantial ones, and familial details about Aunt Terry, all delivered at a brisk pace while we weave through the crowd, under English and French train announcements. If I didn’t know better, I would say she even seems a little nervous.

“Montreal is fully bilingual.”

“McGill’s campus is actually within walking distance; we’ll come back tomorrow.”

“Poutine is honestly kind of disgusting, but you can’t in good conscience leave Montreal without trying it.”

“Terry is a baker. She has a shop on St-Laurent. It’s pretty famous.”

“Aunt Terry is nothing like Mom; unless they’re standing right next to each other, you almost wouldn’t know they’re twins.”

“Wait, wait, wait—your mom is a twin? A real one?”

Corinne finally comes to a halt as we stand on the escalator, and she laughs a little.

“You’re in a new city . . . in a new country, mind you, and the fact that my mom is a twin is what’s blowing your mind?”