All aboard! The 7:13 train to Detroit will be departing from platform 12 momentarily. Please ensure that you have your ticket ready and your luggage-

“Well, maybe the boy isn’t right, but I’m not going to shell out a hundred dollars every week for nothing!”

That was what took me away from my train set, sending the 7:13 to Denver hopelessly off schedule. They were arguing, and from the sound of it, I was the topic again.

“I don’t see how you can say that! Who gives a fuck about the money? Don’t you want to get your son fixed? Don’t you want him to start talking before he has to go to school?”

I was sitting across the room, playing in the corner and pretending not to hear. It seemed to me like I was doing that a lot now—watching two adults wave their arms and point at a young boy sitting on the floor, pretending not to listen. They scowled at one another. They always frowned when they were like this.

“Why is he always my son when we talk about this crap?”

Mom wants me to keep going to that office on the other side of town. I don’t like it very much. There’s a nice lady with a bowl of candy as soon as you walk in the door, but once you get past her and into the next room, the man there is really mean. Last time he just kept asking me questions and talking to me, but I didn’t answer him. He says I’m hurting my parents, but I don’t know why.

“What the hell is he doing to the boy, anyway? Talking to him? Must be one hell of a one-sided conversation.”

I don’t know why Dad was getting so upset about that office. Not that I want to go back. I don’t like that place at all. I think the man in the suit with the clipboard has it all wrong, too. I heard him talking to my Mom one time, after he let me go. He kept talking about “traw-mah,” how something must have happened to me when I was really little. That’s not why I don’t talk, though.

Really, I would much rather just stay at home on those days and play with my train set. It wasn’t a very big set, not like the ones in the window of the store, but in my imagination it was my own passenger railway. I liked to play conductor the most, so I could talk to all my passengers.

The conductor has to be reassuring. He has to make important announcements to passengers and always tell the truth. He can’t say anything upsetting or be angry at anything. When I told my passengers “We’ll be pulling into Denver in just four minutes,” I never lied. My words meant something.

“-open his mouth! God, it’s all your fault!!!”

Ding-Dong. The doorbell rang, and Mom and Dad froze with their fingers in the air, ready for more pointing. But they snapped out of it in no time, and Mom was running to the kitchen while Dad ran to the door. I followed him, to see what would happen. He opened the door with a big, fat smile on his face.

“Bob and Lisa Cowens! What a surprise!” He sounded really happy to see them, ‘specially since he was yelling just a second ago.

A man and a woman stood in the doorway, and I guess they were Bob and Lisa Cowens. They were both wearing dark grey overcoats. When they stepped inside and took them off, I saw the man was wearing a black suit, and his wife a dark-blue dress. They looked very normal, like in a catalogue.

“We were just in the neighborhood, thought we might drop by,” the man said.

“Oh, what a pleasant surprise!” my Dad said, his smile getting even bigger. “Oh honey?” he called to the kitchen. My Mom walked out wearing the apron that always hung on the pantry door. She only wore it when other people were there.

“Lisa! Bob!” My Mom looked like she had won a prize. “How wonderful it is to see the both of you!” Her voice got loud and high at the end of the sentence, and it made the word “you” sound more like a squeak. “And Lisa, I absolutely adore your dress!”

The lady looked like she had just heard a funny joke. “This old thing? I just threw it on going out the door.” But she still straightened her clothes and primped her hair while my parents and Mr. Cowens stood there.

Then she finally noticed me. The strange woman bent over me, and she was smiling almost as hard as my Mom was. But her eyes didn’t match her smile; it was like that part of her face was painted on.

“And how are you, little man? When I saw you last you were only this tall!” she held her hand up to my waistline, and I was trying to smile but I couldn’t. All I could do was look at my parents, who still had all of their teeth showing. I didn’t want to open my mouth and have to talk to this lady; I didn’t want to have to pretend with people, like a game. I knew it was wrong to lie.

I hadn’t answered her yet, and her smile started to fade. She turned halfway to my parents. “He isn’t talking yet?”

They looked embarrassed. “Oh, Doctor Francis says that’s nothing to worry about,” my Mom said in a hurry. “He gave him an aptitude test, scored above average! But, you don’t want to hear about all that. Why don’t you come this way to the kitchen? We can catch up.”

When the strangers left I watched them from the window. When they got to their car, they stood on either side and shook their fists at each other. I could hear them yelling. The lady wasn’t smiling anymore, and her dress got rumpled when she got in the car.

When I walked back through the house, I saw that Mom’s apron was hanging back in the kitchen.

“I can’t believe that Lisa! What a fake. You know she didn’t ‘just throw on’ that dress, she stood in front of the mirror for two hours!”

“Putting on airs, both of them. I really hate those Cowens, wouldn’t have answered if I knew it was them. They’re such phonies!”

I walked over to my train set and sat down.

The 3:46 train from San Francisco is running exactly on time, ladies and gentlemen. Please remember to go to the ticket counter to…