By the time I got the apartment door locked, Willie Mae had already disappeared down the hall and out the front door. There was no need to hurry—I wasn’t going to try to catch her, and besides, I knew where she was going—but I had a hard time stopping myself from breaking into a run.

Down the hall, out the door I went. Murray was on the front porch of the big house, back in the day owned by some well-off folks, probably, but now divided into four beat-down apartments. Murray lives in the one right above ours, but in good weather you’ll almost always find him on the porch. Murray is an old guy, and he’s got something wrong with him, something wrong in his head, but he’s a good guy and I probably would have stopped and passed the time of day with him, told him night was coming on and he’d better be getting inside, but I didn’t want to let Willie Mae get too big a lead on me.

So I just said, “Yo, Murray,” and he said, “I wanna go with our next one myself,” which made about as much sense as anything else he says.

Willie Mae was only a quarter of a block ahead of me on the sidewalk. I tried my best not to hurry, but I was closing the gap because she had that suitcase packed full as a tick, and even on rollers it was slowing her down.

When she got to the end of the block, she had to stop for a string of cars, and I stopped too so I couldn’t catch up to her. It was hard just standing there, though, Willie Mae not twenty feet away, so I tried to think about something else like you’d do when you were making love—to slow down, to make it last longer, which used to work when I was a young man.

I thought about the neighborhood. Burress Station it’s called because back in the day it was a stop on the trolley line. The trolleys were long gone before my time, but I can remember when they still had the rails in the street, how they’d shine in the sun, and in the summer Davey Lyons and I would see who could walk barefoot on them the farthest without burning the soles of our feet off. Dumb kids. Willie Mae wouldn’t remember that, of course—the rails in the street. Too young. Twenty years younger than me. Part of the problem, I guess, which I hate to admit because you can’t fix that, can’t do anything about the years on you.

The traffic cleared and Willie Mae headed across the intersection, me coming on behind.

I didn’t think I’d gotten any closer, but something made her stop and whirl around.

I thought she was going to say, What the hell are you following me for? Instead, she pointed at my suitcase and said, “What are you carrying that suitcase for, Donald? You don’t have a damn thing in it. You can’t fool me. You don’t carry a full suitcase that way, swinging it all around like some jackass. You want somebody to think it’s full, you got to let it hang straight down, maybe lean that way a little bit, like it’s got some weight to it.”

“Maybe you could show me, sweetheart,” I said, but she just rolled her eyes and turned and walked on.

Now, anybody listening to this conversation would probably think we were about as looney as Murray. The thing is, Willie Mae is an actress. She grew up in Little Rock, just like me, but after high school she spent a few years out in California trying to break into the movies. She did have a part in one, too, and why not, a beautiful young black woman that a fellow would be proud to walk down the same street with, even trailing a quarter-block behind. The movie was called House of Blood, and she even had two lines—“Come on, let’s go on in. It’ll be fun!”—which she could deliver better than Meryl Streep, I promise you. Until they cut off the cable TV for lack of payment, we’d look for that movie every day, every single day.

She hasn’t told me she’s going back to California, but the smart money’s on that.

Anyway, the suitcase business. One of the things that drives her up a wall watching TV or a movie is some actor carrying a cup supposedly full of coffee, waving it all around, gesturing with it, etc. You don’t carry a real cup of coffee that way. And you don’t take big long gulps of hot coffee, either. You sip it. Willie Mae could teach Meryl Streep a thing or two about drinking coffee, I kid you not. I didn’t know her expertise had extended to carrying suitcases, but there you go.

I followed her on to the train station feeling a little better about things because after all she’d taken time to stop and give me advice on carrying an empty suitcase, which was a kindness. Am I wrong?

So, feeling better about things, I thought there was a chance my dream would come true, this dream I had, which was this: We’d get to the station, and right before she got on the train Willie Mae would say to herself, Hey, I could do worse, Donald may be older than dirt and no ball of fire, but he’s a gentle man and just loves the crap out of me. Then she’d cash in her ticket and come back home with me.

That was the first dream, the original dream. But I knew that was craziness. Willie Mae had made up her mind to head back to California and get another line or two in a movie, that was her dream, and when you love someone you have to include their dream in your own. So then I revised my dream, which now ended with Willie Mae saying, Donald, why don’t you come to California with me? And we’d ride the train together to California.

We got to the train station, Willie Mae first and me about fifteen seconds later. She didn’t bother going to the ticket window because she’d already bought hers, but she did go over and look at the train schedule on the wall.

Once, trains came into Little Rock one right after another, but now there’ll be a freight train every now and then and maybe a passenger train or two a day. Same for buses. In fact, I don’t even know if you can catch a bus in Little Rock any more. Was it better in the old days? The best time is whenever Willie Mae is with me. If she’s not, look out below!

When she got through trying to read the train schedule, she went over to the big window on the north that looked out on the tracks, stood there a minute, then turned around and sat down in the first row of plastic seats. I can remember when instead of plastic seats they had wooden benches like church pews, and on the second floor of the station was a big restaurant that . . . Oh, hell with that. Hell with the old days. Did I talk about the old days too much with Willie Mae, was that it? I won’t do that anymore, I swear I won’t. I’ll act as young as I can without it getting embarrassing. Nothing more ridiculous than some old fart trying to act like a twenty-year-old.

Just to have something to do while we were waiting on the train, I went over to the schedule. There was a train due to come in from Memphis in just a few minutes. From Little Rock, its next stop would be Russellville. That’s about one hour from here. Then no doubt it’d stop in Ft. Smith. After that into the West, and California here I come!

Willie Mae stood up and pulled her suitcase over to the door that led out to the tracks. Only after she opened the door did I hear the train coming. No surprise that she heard it first. Young ears, old ears.

We stood waiting for the train to come to a stop, me standing about ten yards from her.

There were only two passenger cars. She must have known which one she needed because she immediately headed toward the second one, which I happened to be standing beside.

When she passed me, I looked her right in the eyes, but she didn’t look back.

Oh shit.

I stood there until the train moved off toward Russellville. There were two lights on the back, one red and one blue. Then the night ate them.

There was no train due in for me to throw myself on the tracks in front of until next morning, so I just stood there and called Willie Mae’s name and howled and cried until the security guard came out and told me to move my drunk ass on out of there.

“I’m not drunk. I just got the blues,” I told him, “blues real bad.”

“Move it on, move it on.”

I wiped at my eyes.

“I got the blues, but I’m seeing red cause I’m burning in hell fire.”

“Take my advice, pal, and lay off the wine. Now move it on, move it on.”

I walked back home. “Home.” Two of the apartments are empty, and now with Willie Mae gone, it’s just me and Murray. I’m almost up to the porch steps before I realize he’s still there where he was when I left earlier to follow Willie Mae, only now standing back in night shadows so dark I can barely see him.

I wipe at my eyes.

He says something.

“What did you say, Murray?”

He stands there in the darkness.

I think what he said was the same thing he said earlier, but what was that? I can’t remember, and for some reason it now seems important that I do, a matter of life and death.

I have a sudden chill—a goose stepping on my grave. Maybe Murray is an angel sent by God, not to give me hope but something better, the secret of living without it, if only I could remember Murray’s words, decipher their meaning.

I go up on the porch but don’t go inside, don’t want to go in there all alone.

“I’ll just wait here with you, Murray” I say, and he nods, smiling. Or is that a grimace?