Frozen Rails and Warm Coffee

The crossing signal had been stuck on red for forty minutes and counting. I knew because I kept checking the clock on my dashboard, the one with the cracked plastic cover I'd been meaning to replace since my divorce. It was a little after 4 AM, February, and the thermometer sticker on my windshield said minus nineteen. The sticker was probably wrong. It usually read optimistic.

My name is Lacey, I'm thirty-six years old, and I sell coffee out of a kiosk in the lobby of the district hospital in Sarmanovo. That night the kiosk had closed early because of a shift mix-up, some paperwork confusion between me and the girl on the evening rotation, and I'd left the kiosk an hour ahead of schedule only to get stranded behind a white van full of egg crates at the one railroad crossing on the outskirts of town. The boulder field on either side of the road was all frost-cracked granite, gray and split open like old bread. Somewhere past the crossing a locomotive sat stalled on the tracks, humming to itself.

The van ahead of me had its hazards on. After a while the driver got out. He was a tall man in a quilted canvas jacket, and he walked over to the pile of boulders at the shoulder and stretched his arms out wide, then over his head, the way you do when you've been sitting too long. His breath came out in big white clouds.

I sat there a minute longer with my engine idling and the heater doing its best. Then I grabbed my thermos off the passenger seat and got out.

The cold hit me in the face like a door. My boots crunched on the frozen gravel and I walked up alongside the van, past the crates stacked in the back, each one stamped with a farm name in faded purple ink. The man turned when he heard me.

"Morning," I said. "You know how long this thing has been stuck?"

"Longer than me," he said. "I got here about twenty minutes before you did. Signal's frozen solid, I think. Look at it."

The signal light hung there, red, with a rime of ice built up on the housing like the light itself had a beard. We both looked at it. It did not change.

"I'm Corey," he said, and stuck out a glove.

"Lacey." I shook it. His glove was stiff with cold.

"You work nights?" he asked, nodding at the badge clipped to my coat, the hospital one with my picture on it, which I always forgot to take off when I left the building.

"Coffee kiosk. In the hospital lobby. I did a double yesterday and they sent me home early tonight over a schedule mess, which sounds like a gift, except here I am." I held up the thermos. "At least I came prepared. You want some? It's still hot. Mostly hot."

"Well, yes," he said. "Thank you."

He had a cup in the van, a battered enamel one with a chip on the rim, and he poured us each a measure. We stood by the boulders and drank. The locomotive hummed in the distance. There was no other sound for miles, no wind even, just the hum and our breathing.

"Your gloves smell like coffee," he said at one point. "Good coffee, too. Not the burnt stuff."

"That's my whole life, that smell. It's in my coat, my hair, my car. I could probably stop bathing and nobody would notice a difference."

He laughed at that, a real laugh, quick and low. "I know the feeling. I smell like a barn, but a clean barn. There's a difference."

"What do you do?"

He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled something out. It was a small metal ring, the kind that holds a binder together, silver and a little bent. He'd apparently been fixing a notebook in the van earlier and the spare ring had ended up in his pocket, and now he fidgeted with it while he talked, threading it through his gloved fingers and popping it open and closed.

"I candle eggs," he said. "Guinea fowl, mostly, some chicken. You hold each egg up over a light in a dark room and look through the shell to see what's going on inside. Whether it's fertile, how it's developing, whether there's a blood ring that means it's dead and you cull it."

"That sounds lonely."

"It is quiet," he said, in the tone of a man correcting a word choice gently. "The light comes through green. Some kind of filter on the candler. Every egg gets this little green glow, and you can see the veins branching, like frost on a window except it's alive and moving if you look long enough." He popped the binder ring open and shut. "I like the precision of it. There's a right answer every time. The egg is good or it isn't, and you learn to see it fast."

"How long have you done that?"

"Eleven years, give or take. I'm thirty-nine." He said his age the way some men state their shoe size, no apology in it. "You?"

"Thirty-six. Coffee for six years. Before that..." I hesitated, because I hadn't said it out loud to a stranger in a while. "I was married. Eight years. Divorced two years ago now."

He didn't say sorry or make a face about it, which I appreciated more than I can say. He just nodded and drank his coffee and said, "So the kiosk is yours now. Your own place."

"More or less. It's a warm little box in a big cold building and people come to me and I give them something hot, and that's about the whole of it. Some nights it feels like the only warm place I belong to. Which is a stupid thing to say to a man you met six minutes ago in a boulder field."

"It's not stupid," he said. "I live alone on the farm. I like the quiet, honestly, I'd choose it over an apartment building full of neighbors any day. But my hands get lonely." He held one up, the glove off now, and looked at it like it belonged to somebody else. Big hand, scarred across two knuckles, the nails cut short the way they have to be when you work with your fingers. "That sounds worse, probably."

"No. I understood it exactly!"

The signal stayed red. We finished our coffee and I refilled his cup without asking, which he let me do, and we stood there while the sky went from black to that dark gray that comes before anything else. His breath and mine kept mixing in the air between us, and I noticed I had stopped feeling the cold in my feet, which either meant my boots were better than I thought or that I'd stopped paying attention.

"So what happens when the train finally moves," he said, "do we just drive off? I never got your number, and I'm realizing I'd like to."

"I don't have a card or anything. I could write it in the frost on your windshield."

"Or," he said, and popped the binder ring open and shut once more, "you could tell me and I could write it in the actual notebook I was fixing in the van. Which has a pen in it."

"You're a practical man."

"I candle eggs for a living. Practical is the job description."

He got the notebook out, a cheap spiral one with a coffee stain of his own on the cover, and I told him my number, digit by digit, and he wrote it slow and neat and read it back to me twice. Neither of us mentioned the fact that his phone was presumably in the van too, or mine in my car, and that we were doing this on paper in the cold like a couple of characters in an old movie. It felt right, so we did it anyway.

Down the tracks, the stalled locomotive changed its hum, a lower note, and somewhere behind us a chain clanked.

"Here we go," Corey said. "Might be moving."

"Might be."

Neither of us moved toward the vehicles yet. We stood there a moment longer, two people with hot coffee and cold hands and a red light that would not change, and I found I wasn't in any hurry for it to.

He reached over without asking first, which should have bothered me, and took my wrist in his fingers. Two fingers and a thumb, the way you'd hold a small bird.

"Hold still a second. Your face has gone white around the edges."

"I'm fine."

"You're not fine, you're half frozen." He counted off a few seconds, staring at the middle distance, then let go. "Pulse is okay. You're just cold all the way down."

The strange part was that I hadn't flinched. A man I'd met half an hour ago grabbing my wrist out of nowhere, and my body just went, oh, all right, that's happening. Maybe it was the cold slowing everything, including my reflexes. Maybe it was something else.

"There's a flat boulder over there," I said, nodding toward the biggest one in the pile, the one with a lee side facing away from the wind. "Out of the wind, if you sit low. Might as well wait comfortably."

"Might as well." He picked up the thermos and his cup and followed me over, and I noticed he walked behind me the whole way, never once passing me, and I noticed that I noticed, which told me something too.

The flat boulder had a patch of rime on it that squeaked when I brushed it with my glove. We sat down side by side with about a hand's width between us, close enough that his quilted jacket touched my sleeve. The locomotive hummed its low note down the tracks. The red signal burned on top of its iced-over housing like a permanent feature of the landscape.

"I keep thinking it'll change," he said.

"It won't. It's comfortable now. It's decided we live here."

He laughed, a short warm sound that came out as fog. And then we both went quiet, and the quiet didn't have that awkward edge it usually has with a new person. It just