The Train Club Mix-Up

Louis Webb stood in the doorway of the converted loft in a suburb of Montreal and looked at the banner hanging crookedly over a landscape of miniature mountains. It read SINGLES MIXER in glittery letters that were already shedding sparkles onto the train tracks below.

"You've got to be kidding me," he said to his sister Laila, who was steering him through the door with both hands on his shoulders like a tugboat guiding a barge. "A model train club? This is where you send your forty-two year old brother to meet women?"

"Louis, you've been divorced for four months and you've spent every weekend reorganizing your garage," Laila said, giving him a final push into the room. "You need this. You're forty-two, act like it. Go talk to someone about trains!"

"That's the problem, nobody here wants to talk about trains, look at them!" And it was true. The room was full of adults, all of them clearly over thirty, some over sixty, wearing little nametags and holding little paper cups of wine, and almost none of them were looking at the beautiful, absurd, hand-built towns on the tables. They were looking at each other with the strained smiles of people who had also been dragged here by somebody.

Louis, who was a salesman and had spent twenty years being friendly on purpose, found that being friendly for free was harder. He got a cup of wine. He stood near a display of HO scale freight cars. A man named Davey told him about a bridge he was building and Louis told him about the importance of good hinges in general, and the conversation consisted of nothing else, and it was fine, and it was not what his sister had promised.

Then he saw her.

Across the room, near the far end of the longest table, a woman was holding a tiny locomotive up to the light the way a jeweler holds a ring. She was forty-two years old, same as him, though he didn't know that yet, and she had dark hair pinned up with what looked like two pencils, which Louis found wildly charming for reasons he couldn't explain. She turned the locomotive over. She frowned at it. She looked around the room with an expression of pure confusion, as if she had expected something completely different from all this.

Louis made the same face back at her.

She caught him doing it and laughed out loud, right there in the middle of the mixer, a real laugh, the kind you don't plan. She crossed the room holding the locomotive like it was a peace offering.

"Okay, I have to know," she said. "Are you actually into trains, or were you also tricked?"

"Tricked," Louis admitted. "My sister. She thinks I need hobbies and people. She may be right about the hobbies."

"Brianna Fairchild," she said, and stuck out her hand, which still had a smudge of grease on one knuckle. "I'm here to sort out a friend's collection. He inherited three hundred locomotives from his father and he wants to sell them and I owed him a favor, so apparently I'm appraising tiny trains on a Friday night."

"Louis Webb. Salesman. Professional nodder. My sister Laila signed me up for this without telling me what it was."

"A mixer," Brianna said, looking around at the room with its crooked banner. "In a train club. Who thought that would work? Half these people came for the trains and are annoyed, and the other half came for the dating and are terrified."

"The trains are the only ones having a good time," Louis said, and she laughed again, and something in his chest unclenched for the first time in months.

They escaped. Neither of them suggested it out loud exactly, it just happened, drifting away from the tables toward the back of the loft where a door stood half open on a room that smelled like dust and machine oil. Inside, cardboard boxes were stacked to the ceiling, hundreds of them, and in the middle sat a large wooden worktable with a quilt spread over it.

"Sorry," Brianna said, cheeks going pink. "I've been using this as my staging area. The quilt isn't mine, well, it is mine, it's my grandmother's. I put it down to protect the table."

The quilt was beautiful, hand-stitched in blues and whites, a pattern of little stars. Brianna smoothed one corner of it with her hand the way you'd touch something you loved.

"My grandmother made it," she said. "It was supposed to be a wedding present. She started it when my mother got married, then it passed to me, and everyone always assumed, you know, that it would get used eventually." She shrugged. "It's been in a cedar chest for ten years. I figured it deserved an outing."

"Wedding she never had?" Louis asked gently.

"How did you..."

"Lucky guess. I got divorced in the spring. Four months ago, formally. Twelve years married. So I know what an unused quilt looks like, sort of."

"Oh," Brianna said softly. "Oh, so that's the trick. The sister, the mixer, the freshly single salesman."

"Recycled goods, that's me. Back on the shelf at a discount."

"Don't do that," she said, and there was a flash of something sharp in it. "Don't do the discount joke. You don't seem like discount to me, Louis Webb, and we've been talking for ten minutes."

He didn't know what to say to that, so he said nothing, and she let him off the hook by turning and gesturing at the shelves that lined the far wall, row after row of miniature towns, lit from above, a tiny church, a tiny diner, a mountain with a tunnel through it.

"Look at these," she said. "There's a whole village over there with laundry on a clothesline. You can't see it standing up, the angle's wrong, everything's built to be viewed from above or from track height. From track height you'd need to be two inches tall."

"So the view's wasted on us."

"Unless." She looked at the quilt, then at him, and a grin crept across her face, a nervous one. "Unless you lie down on the table. Eye level with the tracks. It's actually the best seat in the house, my friend Norm does it all the time, he says it's the whole point of the club."

"You're daring me."

"I am absolutely daring you. Lie down on my grandmother's quilt and look at the village like a two inch tall person."

"Fine, but if I get in trouble, you're telling Laila it was your idea." Louis kicked off his shoes, climbed up, and stretched out on the quilt, hands behind his head. From down there the tracks really did stretch away like a real horizon, and the little town with its tiny laundry lines sat at eye level, glowing under the work lamp.