The Coach Voucher

"The room was released by the benefits office, sir," Lockhart said. "That's what my handheld shows."

He turned the screen toward me. A small gray line read ROOMETTE 4, then RELEASED, then a reason: TRAVELER DECEASED. Under it, a field for the user who had entered it. It held one word. DESK.

"That doesn't say who," I said.

"It doesn't have to. Benefits pushes those in a batch when they get a death notice. Overnight, sometimes." He said it the way a man hands over a small, sad, familiar fact. "It can overwrite a transfer that went in the day before. It happens more than you'd think."

It was a good explanation. That was the terrible part. It sounded like something I would have believed on a Tuesday, if it had happened to somebody else.

"Benefits stamped my transfer yesterday afternoon," I said. "Why would the same office cancel it today?"

"Two departments, one database, no one reading the other's mail," said the woman in the camel coat, and gave a small, rueful sigh, a fellow victim of the railway's clumsiness. "That's how these things go. I'm sure it will be corrected on Monday."

"On Monday my father's ashes will be in the ground," I said.

Nobody answered that. Paulette studied her shoes. The man in the fleece vest cleared his throat and suddenly found the ceiling interesting.

Lockhart lowered the handheld. "Here's what I can do, Mr. Rooney. There's a place for you in car nine, aisle side, and I'll put a dining voucher in your hand right now. When we reach Baker City tomorrow I'll file the complaint myself. You have my word. But I cannot leave this platform with the corridor blocked, and I cannot hold a train past the bell for a records dispute."

I looked at Roomette 4: the bench where my father would have put his feet up and told me about the year my mother saved for a hat, the big window, the little fold-down table where I meant to set the box.

Car nine had no windows worth the name and a hundred sleeping strangers. My father's ashes would ride in the overhead rack between somebody's snoring and somebody's coat.

"Mr. Rooney," Lockhart said. "Sixty seconds."

Two doors, one plan. Take the coach seat and lose the room, and the record said I had agreed. Stay and be taken off the platform in front of everyone I would never see again.

Somewhere behind Lockhart, the corridor door hissed, and the first heavy footsteps of Officer Bettencourt started up the steps.