Free A Star for Mrs. Blake by April Smith

offered to reserve a table in the first-class dining car, but Cora declined. She’d had a look on the way to the restroom and it was horrifying: white tablecloths and rattling silver, well-dressed couples silently picking at shrimp over ice. Then, he suggested, perhapsa seat at the bar? Even worse. Nothing could have dragged her into that smoke-filled den of hard-looking men with flowers in their lapels sitting at circular tables painted black and white like shooting targets, fawning over women with loud red mouths.
    Her little alcove was just fine. She devoured the bread-and-butter, ate the apple down to the seeds, wrapped the seeds in a napkin so the porter wouldn’t see, took off her pumps and put her feet up on the automatic footrest, and fell asleep. When she awoke, the small farms that had been regularly dividing the countryside into paddocks and fields had vanished, and all you could see for several miles were grimy shoe factories and textile mills, as if the train ride that had begun at the station in Bangor had passed through time to the pragmatism of present day; as if, where the tracks ended at South Station, Boston was the culmination of a century of progress.
    Cora stepped off the train into humid summer air and the smell of coal fire. The steel mass of a dozen engines idling in the open-roofed depot made her feel slight, as if she could be swept away like a leaf under the polished heels of well-dressed commuters striding along the bays, casting impatient shadows on ashen squares of daylight. She followed the crowd through a gate that led to a vast arcade, where high arched windows brought in the evening sun. You’d think, from all the light everywhere, that Boston was a city made of gold.
    South Station was the largest manmade structure she had ever been inside. You could hear the rumble of the trains below, but there was also a hush that came from the echoes of voices and hurried footfalls dissipating in the great marble hall. It was just past six o’clock as she hurried through a maze of kiosks selling newspapers and sundries, saltwater taffy and chocolate caramels, people streaming in and out in all directions, until she saw a sign for the women’s waiting room and made a beeline for it, eager to avoid the rows of benches where unsavory derelicts and large immigrant families had spread themselves out.
    But the entrance to the women’s waiting room was blocked by a large woman hovering in the doorway, holding on to the molding to support her considerable weight.
    “Are you all right?” Cora asked.
    “I’m wonderin’ where I might sit down.”
    Her voice was soft with a southern inflection. She wore a worn brown cloth coat and a turban-style hat with a veil. The hat was bright purple and seemed to have nothing to do with the coat. Her legs were bowed and her stockings rolled down, the ankles all swollen up. This woman was somebody’s grandma. She had the right to sit down.
    “Why, you can rest inside,” Cora said. “You’ll be comfortable there. It’s for ladies only,” she added encouragingly.
    The woman’s rheumy eyes moved over Cora with pity, as if she were the slowest-minded idiot in the world.
    “Those kinda ladies don’t want me in there. Don’t you worry yourself,” she added with a bitter edge.
    The only Negro people Cora ever had anything to do with were the porters on the train and the seasonal workers who came up to Maine from Jamaica for employment on the potato farms. They had made an impression. She remembered being five or six years old and seeing a poorly dressed mother and her children walking down the middle of Main Street, as if they didn’t think they were allowed to use the sidewalk. They wore head scarves made of potato sacks. Cora was frightened and held on to her mother’s hand, but Luella took them right up to those people and said, “That’s not how we do it in our town. You’re welcome here, like any other.”
    “It’s okay to go inside,” Cora told the