After losing her job and her girlfriend, it's time for Annie Abraham to admit defeat and move back in with her parents. She has hardly been back to her tiny Montana hometown since the unforgettable summer before her senior year of college, when she...
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I am never taking the train again. When the route from Seattle to Deer Pines came up on the weekly deals list, the ticket price slashed to thirty-five dollars, it seemed like a no brainer. Especially when it would've cost me three hundred bucks to fly, another hundred to get a taxi home from Glacier Park, and I figured those kinds of numbers make up too significant a portion of my bank balance for it to be worth it.
Except it would've been more than worth it because I just spent seventeen hours on the train from hell. It's bad enough that it should have been fourteen hours, nevermind the fact that we had to wait in Wenatchee for the police to haul off a couple of guys who started a fistfight and we stopped for an hour between Sandpoint and Libby waiting for freight to pass. Worse still: my broken seat only reclined halfway and the guy next to me snored louder than a monster truck so I haven't had a minute of sleep in the last twenty-seven hours, and I didn't bring enough food with me to last the journey.
And now, the cherry on the cake, there's no-one to pick me up from the train station. That wasn't a problem when I was supposed to get into Deer Pines at seven: Mom was going to meet me and we were going to go for breakfast before she had to be at work for nine. I was so looking forward to a couple hours alone with my mom when I haven't been home in over a year, haven't seen her since she and Dad came out to Seattle in February for Dad to go to a conference.
Actually, this cake has two cherries, because it's snowing. Of course it's snowing. I've spent most of the last seven winters in Seattle and I've yet to experience snow in the city, but it's a guarantee here. Deer Pines, Montana, where it snows seventy days of the year and the sun hardly shows it's face from the middle of November until the start of March. Here, we get seventy inches of snow each year and one year, we got almost half of that in a single day. Town came to a standstill, everybody snowed in. This snow, though, is pathetic. A flurry of fluffy flakes that probably won't stick yet, they'll just make me colder and wetter and angrier.
It's great. Perfect. Exactly what I need when the station is a mile out of town and the only other person who got off here is already driving away by the time I've grabbed my bags and made it to the parking lot. Most people are continuing on to Whitefish or West Glacier or taking the train all the way to Chicago. Deer Pines, an hour south of the Canadian border and an hour west of Glacier National Park, with a population two thousand eight hundred and forty, doesn't attract many visitors.
I didn't think this through. When I took full advantage of the generous baggage allowance and crammed a hundred pounds of belongings into two suitcases as well as the backpack digging into my shoulders, I didn't anticipate having to drag them a mile in the snow, but there's no taxi rank and the help desk is closed and my cellphone is dead. Great.
My charging cable chose the moment I boarded the train to give up the ghost and I did my best to make my fifty-two percent battery last as long as possible, but it died a couple hours ago, not long after we left Libby. If the train had been on time, I'd have made it here before my phone ran out of juice, but it wouldn't have mattered because my mom would've been here.
