Some years ago, I don’t remember if it was a dozen or two decades by now, they stopped offering cafe service on the short hauls, the seven that originated or terminated in Albany. The other six include two for Niagara Falls, two for Rutland, Vermont, one for Toronto and one for Montreal. Those still have cafe service in the cafe cars. They’re also the most likely to run late, especially the two that cross the border because fear is mud and it makes for a slow slog.

We were on the Ethan Allen Express out of Rutland. We’d boarded at about 2:50 in the afternoon and it had left the station right on time at 2:54.

I was on my way to a funeral. I headed straight for the cafe car. What was there to do but look out the window, contemplate the river. You think of it as flowing south, water entering it from the mountains on either side, all going down to New York and then to the Atlantic. But actually the ocean pushes back. The whole river will flow north for a hundred and fifty something miles; you can’t really see it except in winter if it’s cold enough for ice to form and then break up and if you’re watching at the right time you see the white slabs moving the wrong way.

On my way to a funeral, another old friend gone. Sitting there, moving south, watching the water flow as it did before I came and will do after I’m gone, and the light and the hills, trying to come to terms with the rhythms of life and death.

I was happy to find an empty table.

She’d gone past me to the service counter. A couple of minutes after we got rolling, she swayed back down the aisle, came to where I sat, and slid in across from me as she was surely entitled to do. She had a cardboard tray with a miniature bottle of Tito’s Handmade Vodka, a can of Schweppes Ginger Ale, and a plastic railroad cup with ice. She opened the Tito’s, poured it all out into the cup, and then popped the tab on the can and added a measured amount of the Schweppes.

She didn’t start out asking me to kill someone.

She started with a simple, “Hi, Tony, how are you?”

We knew each other slightly, vaguely, from running into each other, up and around the Woodstock area, or maybe Saugerties or even Phoenicia or Shandanken. At that point, I couldn’t for the life of me remember her name. “Fine, fine,” I said. “And yourself?”

“I’m grand, just grand,” she said in a tone that said all things opposite, miserable, bitter, and disappointed in life. I tried my best to take her at her word and ignore her manner, because I had no desire to know.