Kayla, the young waitress with a little boys photo pinned to her apron, held up a framed newspaper clipping, a photo of a newborn wrapped in a train blanket, and the headline about a baby born on the Lake Shore Limited in a blizzard.
Mr. Ashworth, she said, you said somebody has to yell all aboard. That somebody delivered my son.
In January 2024, she said, she had been nine months pregnant on that train when it got stuck outside Erie for nineteen hours, and she went into labor in the sleeper car with no hospital for miles. A conductor walked every car all night bringing blankets and coffee, and when her time came, he and a nurse who happened to be aboard delivered her baby boy right there. She named him after the conductor. His name is Dale.
The whole rehearsal dinner had gone silent. Dale, my son, had gone red around the eyes.
Preston called him the family ticket taker, and that ticket taker brought a baby safely into the world in a frozen train car in the middle of the night.
Kayla had taken the waitressing job at that restaurant only a month before, and when the family at table six turned out to include the conductor from the train, she had spent the whole evening working up the courage. The little boy on her apron was the baby. She drove him an hour that night just so Dale could meet his namesake.
I am Dales father. He buttered his roll and said welcome to the family, Preston, and took the joke, because a man who has delivered a baby on a stranded train does not need a hedge fund manager to tell him his work does not matter. Preston, who had flown in on a private jet, shook my sons hand for a long time and did not make another joke about trains.