I ordered coffee at the kiosk and watched the entrance to the train station. Nobody came, nothing happened. I stretched out and yawned. My joints cracked. Twelve hours on the train. The coffee was dark and bitter. It came in a small paper cup. I drank it in two sips, crushed the cup in my fist and threw it into a garbage can. I didn’t see anyone coming after me.

The weather was gray and so was the town. Gray stone. Gray poured concrete fixtures. Warm droplets of moisture hung in the air, threatening rain.

I noticed the second guy right off the bat. He must have circled around the park to flank me. This guy was bigger than rat-face and wore jeans with a thin leather jacket. He looked like a young thug. Same age as the first guy. The second one had wet-looking hair combed in a side part.

So I figured the first guy would be coming up behind me. They had wanted me to notice the second one. That was the strategy, distract, induce panic, come at me from both sides. I’d been out of the military for only a week. Their little strategy wasn’t going to work.

The park was carved up into little walk-ways. I went off the footpath and cut across the lawn. Using peripheral vision, I clocked rat-face coming off the street and passing the kiosk. He and his leather jacket buddy were moving in sync, wedging me in. Dense evergreens crowded the path where it sunk down in a dip a dozen yards away. The dip would do. I figured less than twenty seconds casual walking.

Laurel bushes blocked out the light. The dip was an intersection. A spider web of narrow walkways converged in its hollow. But the two guys were gone. I stayed there for a couple of minutes to see if they would come. Maybe they were waiting me out. But nobody waits more than a minute. A minute’s a long time if you’re waiting. Young thugs in particular are impatient, nervous and jumpy. You can always wait them out. The two guys didn’t show.

I exited the park and crossed over to the sidewalk. The town center was old and busy. The kind of old that gets preserved by committee. Busy with regular people doing regular things that hadn’t changed all that much in a couple hundred years.

Twelve hours on the train made me want to stretch out. To walk. To loosen the hips and the knees and ankles. But first I wanted to stop by the town hall, see if I could find any record of my mother’s family. She had been French and spent her summers in Alencourt. I was curious about that side of my family because as far as I knew, my mother hadn’t ever come back to France after moving to the United States.