Every Day at 5:42

The dog knew which train. Out of forty a day it came only for the 5:42, gray at the muzzle now, and sat at the yellow line with its front paws even, watching the doors and not Dale.

Dale watched it from the door of car three, his punch warm in his fist. Part of one ear was gone, healed to a notch, and nobody had ever been able to tell him how.

He counted the doors off the way he had for thirty years. First, third, the rear of car two. People came down the steps in their work coats, hunched against the salt wind off the river, and the dog read each of them like a name on a list. A woman in a green scarf. A kid with earbuds. A man carrying takeout that steamed in the cold; the dog’s ears swung for that one and then settled.

Last door closed. The 5:42 sighed and pulled out toward the dark end of the platform, and the dog put its head down and walked off into the lot like somebody who’d missed his ride and would try again tomorrow.

“That’s the Commuter.” Maya, behind him. New, maybe twenty-three, still wearing the lanyard like it meant something. “That’s what everybody calls him.”

“I know what they call him.”

She had the steel bowl they kept by the bench, filled from the bathroom tap, and she set it down where the dog would find it. Dale watched her and didn’t say anything, and then said it anyway.

“You shouldn’t feed it.”

“I don’t feed him. Just water.”

“Water, food, same thing. You keep putting it out, it never leaves.” He climbed down onto the platform, his knees letting him know. “Some things you let walk off.”

Maya gave him the look the young give the tired. “He’s not bothering anybody.”

“He bothers me,” Dale said, and went to clock out.

Three weeks. That was all he had left, and he meant to spend them the way he’d spent thirty years — through the station and touching nothing. He had a punch and a route and a pension waiting on the far side of December. He did not have, and did not want, a single face he’d have to carry home.

That had been the whole trick of it. You don’t look. People got on, people got off, and now and then one of them stopped — an empty seat where a regular used to ride. The depot read the bulletins flat, the way it read everything, a name and a date and a fact, and you let it pass through you without catching on anything.

So it bothered him, two days later, when Maya found him at the vending machine — the one that took exact change and nothing else, that he was feeding quarters one at a time — and asked.

“You’ve worked this platform longer than anybody. Whose dog is it?”

The quarter hung in the slot.

“You don’t know either,” she said. “Nobody does. He just comes for the 5:42.”

The coffee dropped. Dale didn’t reach for it, because he did know, and it had come up in him before he could stop it. A regular, years back, before they changed the timetable. Heavyset, friendly, the kind who told the conductor good night like he meant it. Rode the 5:42 home every day. And there’d been a dog at the line when he stepped off — younger then, darker, up on its feet the second the doors opened, the whole back half of it going with the tail.

Avery. Tom Avery — the surname came first and the rest of him after.

“There was a man,” Dale said. He picked up the coffee to have something for his hands. “Rode this train home every night. Dog waited for him right there at the line.”

“So where’s the man?”

Dale remembered the morning. October, like now. Conductors crowded into the depot office with their coffees and the supervisor reading down the sheet without lifting his voice once. Avery, Thomas. His heart had quit in a station two cities over, the wrong name on the wall, and they’d driven him home the long way because there was no other way left to bring him.

That was the part his mouth wouldn’t hand the girl. A man’s days get closed out somewhere — the office finds the desk empty, the family folds the chair away and gives the coats to the church. But the platform never got the notice. The 5:42 simply kept arriving, night after night, doors open and Tom Avery not on the steps, and the only one still counting was the dog.

“He moved away,” Dale said. “The man. Family moved.”

It wasn’t a lie. It just wasn’t the part that mattered, and from the way Maya’s face moved he could see she’d heard the part he’d left in the dark.

The dog wasn’t waiting for a man who’d moved.

He decided to end it. That was how he put it to himself, awake at two with the radiator knocking: he’d make a call and get the dog off his platform before his last shift, close the loose end nobody else had the sense to close. Animal control. They’d find it a place or they wouldn’t, but it would stop being a thing he had to look at. A man three weeks from the door does not take on the grief of a stranger. He’d had grief up close once and built a career out of not having it again.

He kept the number on the back of a transfer slip in his coat. He’d call from the platform the night he settled on it, so he could point — that one, come get it.

But at 5:42 that night the dog wasn’t at the line.

It was down by the bench, in the orange wash of the sodium lamp that had been dying for a year. On its side, ribs going too fast and too shallow, like something running in place. When Dale crouched over it the dog rolled an eye up at him and tried to get its front legs under it and couldn’t. It got its head up. It looked past his shoulder at the train coming in and kept trying to stand, to reach the line, to do the one thing it had come to do, and its body wouldn’t carry it the last twenty feet.

The 5:42 pulled in. The doors opened. The dog scrabbled at the concrete and made a sound Dale felt in his back teeth, and the people came down and went around the two of them without slowing, and not one of them was the one.

Doors closed. The train left.

The dog quit trying and lay there heaving with its eyes open.

Dale had the slip in his pocket with the number on it. He stood in the hanging diesel smell with the lamp ticking on and off, and understood, with a flat disgust at himself, that he was not going to stand here and watch this and then drive home and eat his dinner.

He got his arms under it. The dog weighed nothing it should have, all frame and fur, and it didn’t fight him. He carried it inside against every regulation in the book, past the vending machine, into the warm little office, and set it down by the heater. He took off his good coat and put that under it because there was nothing else.

“All right,” he said. To the dog, to the room. “All right.”

The vet kept her voice level, which told Dale the rest before the words did. Old. Heart going. The cold and the standing had worn it down to nothing. Weeks, she said, if that, and fewer if it kept up the routine.

“Could somebody else take him?” Maya had driven them; she stood in the corner with her arms folded. “If it’s the platform doing it — somewhere warm, away from the trains —”

“You can try.” The vet rubbed the dog’s good ear and it leaned into her hand without lifting its head. “A bond this old, he won’t hold still for it. He’ll go back. They mostly do.” She looked at Dale, not unkindly. “Whatever the station is to him, he isn’t done with it.”

There was the exit, then, laid out for him. Maya would take the dog. Dale would sign his last sheets Friday, hand in the punch, walk out the depot door, and inside a month nobody at Riverton would be able to say for certain which conductor it was who’d gone in the fall — which was the thing he’d wanted from the start.

The dog’s tail knocked once against the steel table, not for Dale but for the door opening behind him. It checked who it was, the assistant and not the one, and went still.

“I’ll keep him,” Dale said.

Maya turned. “Dale, you don’t have to—”

“I know I don’t.” He put his hand on the dog’s side and felt the heart under it going too fast. “I’m going to.”

He knew what he was signing for. A frozen platform every evening for whatever was left, next to an animal he couldn’t fix, for a man neither of them could put back on those steps. Thirty years of making sure he never carried one of these home, and here it already was in his arms. He took it.

His last shift ended on a Thursday. There was a cake in the depot office and the supervisor said some words, and Dale shook the hands he was meant to shake and couldn’t have named one of them by the time he reached the lot. That part still worked fine.

The rest was new.

He drives back to Riverton in the evenings now. No uniform — there’s no uniform anymore, just a man in a heavy coat with a thermos and a dog on a folded blanket on the passenger seat. He parks. He carries the dog to the steel bench under the lamp, because it can’t make the walk on its own these days, and sits, and the dog rests the dry weight of its head on his knee, and they wait.

At 5:42 the inbound comes in late, the way it’s run late since the timetable changed. The doors open. The dog lifts its head and reads the faces coming down — a man with a hard hat under one arm, two women in scrubs, somebody carrying flowers in a cone of paper, every one of them due somewhere. Dale has caught himself doing it too. Watching the ones who step off. Wondering, for the first time in his life, who’s waiting up the line for each of them, and whose seat goes empty some morning without the platform ever being told.

There’s no plaque. Nobody has said it ought to mean anything. It’s two of them on a cold bench under a bad lamp, keeping an appointment that was never theirs to keep, because the man it belonged to can’t.

The last door shuts. The 5:42 gathers itself and pulls out toward the dark end, and the platform goes quiet.

The dog puts its head down.

Dale doesn’t tell it the man isn’t coming. It’s true and it wouldn’t help, and anyway the dog has known longer than he has. He zips his coat to the chin, pours the last of the coffee, and stays past dusk, past the cold finding his knees, his hand on the dog’s back until it’s ready to go home.