THE TRAIN FROM CHICAGO: A Collection of Sudden Fictions

Grandpa rarely phones. When he does, he doesn’t ask to speak to me. I know long distance is expensive. Sometimes my mother sends secret money and there is always a few hundred on Christmases and birthdays. He said the money saves him when he gets behind. He calls her “Mary Quite Contrary.” She calls him “Daddy.” He rarely saw her after his wife caught him with a woman in a Boston bar a week after Mary Quite Contrary’s tenth birthday.