Dallin
The Romance Beat
Twice Upon a Train
Willow and Keegan Wade met on a train at a wildlife park on the Gulf Coast when they were thirteen and fourteen. They met again on a steam train 26 years later, with Willow's best friend in the next cabin and a lawsuit in her briefcase. This time nobody dragged anybody off.
Some towns keep their history in a museum. Dallin keeps it in its marriages. Every issue, this column follows one of the town's couples: how they met, what almost kept them apart, and where they've ended up. This month: the Wades, at their kitchen table, with the cat, and with a third chair pulled up for the friend who bought the tickets.
DALLIN. Ask Keegan Wade how she met her wife and she'll give you the short version, because she's a surgeon and that's how surgeons talk.
"Train," she said. "Alabama. I was fourteen. Then a second train, 26 years later. Same girl."
Ask Willow, and you'd better sit down.
"She's leaving out everything," Willow said. "She always leaves out everything."
So here is everything, or as much of it as this column can print.
The first train
The first train ran a loop through a wildlife park on the Alabama Gulf coast, three hundred acres of bison and giraffes and peacocks and one small steam engine. Keegan Harper Wade grew up down the road from it, close enough to the docks to see the shrimp boats, the granddaughter of a shrimper with a sixth-grade education whom she still calls the wisest man she ever knew. She'd ridden that train, by her own count, "tons of times."
Willow Mae Lord was thirteen, a New York kid on a trip with her grandparents, who went off to see a show and left her on the train for a couple of hours.
They sat together. In two hours they told each other things they'd never told anyone. Keegan called her Mae, which nobody else did, and led her to a place at the back of the train "where we can see everything and be by ourselves." There was a kiss. Willow, who had never in her life thought of herself as a girl who would kiss a girl, kissed her back.
It ended the way it ended. Keegan's father came looking for her, found them, and pulled her off that train hard enough to break her shoulder. She had surgery. She was fourteen, and she and Willow never got to say a word to each other about what had happened.
"Not on the train, not after," Keegan said. "She went back to New York. That was that."
Willow told no one. Not her grandparents on the drive home. Not her mother. Not, years later, her husband. "Not Nikki," she said, and looked at the third chair. "Definitely not Nikki."
"I'm still deciding whether to forgive her for that," Nikki Randle said.
The friend in the next cabin
Nikki, who writes this paper's It's the Law column and who invited herself to this interview, has known Willow since junior high in New York. Her account of how that started is short. "She was the nicest girl in the building and everybody knew it and everybody used it," she said. "Somebody had to stand in front of her. I volunteered."
"She's been bossing me since I was twelve," Willow said. "Cluck, cluck, she says. Mother Hen. She's the one clucking."
Years later, when Willow was between jobs and sending out resumes that nobody answered, Nikki paid for a trip and told her to pick any way of going she wanted. Plane, boat, limousine. Willow picked a train, without quite knowing why. The train was the Frisco Express, a steam train from another century, restored for one last run from New York to San Francisco before it went to live in a museum in Illinois.
"I paid for the trip," Nikki said. "She picked the train. I want that in the paper. Whatever else I did on that trip, and we'll get to it, the train was her idea and the ticket was mine."
The second train
Keegan, by then chief of trauma surgery at a big New York hospital, had booked the same trip through a travel agent, alone, because she needed to get out of the city. She will say that much and no more.
She did not recognize Willow. She wants that understood, because she has been kicking herself about it for years.
"She'd gone blonde," Keegan said. "Everything about her was different except her eyes, and I wasn't looking at her eyes. I was looking at everything else."
Willow recognized her. Not at first, and not by her face.
"She kissed me," Willow said, "and I'd been kissed like that exactly once in my life. I opened my eyes and looked at hers, brown with gold in them, and the whole train went sideways. I said it out loud. 'Keegan is Keegs.'"
"And then she didn't tell me," Keegan said. "Not right away."
"I had things to work out."
What almost kept them apart
Start with the lawsuit.
At the time, Nikki Randle was a malpractice attorney in New York, and a good one, and she had a case open against a surgeon she had never met. Keegan had a second reason to stay on the train: the hospital's lawyer had told her to, out of reach of the process server, until he could sort things out.
"I figured out who she was before Nikki did," Willow said. "I saw the name on the papers. I didn't say anything to either of them. I didn't know what to say."
"I reached for a summons and saw her face," Nikki said. "That's how I found out my best friend's doctor from childhood was my defendant. I was not gracious about it."
"She was not," Keegan said.
Keegan went to examine her anyway. Nikki closed her laptop, looked at her for a while, and then took the summons out of her case and tore it into tiny pieces and swept them off the desk into the wastebasket. She withdrew from the lawsuit before the exam was over.
"Every once in a while she does the right thing for no reason anyone can see," Willow said. "It always surprises me."
"There was a reason," Nikki said. "I'm just not telling you what it was."
Then Nikki got sick. Sick enough that the train made an unscheduled stop at a station in a county none of them had heard of, with an ambulance waiting and a hospital called Afton Memorial twenty miles down the line. Keegan called ahead from the train. The chairman of the hospital's board met her at the ambulance bay and granted her privileges on the spot, because there was no surgeon in the building who could do what needed doing.
Readers will recognize the chairman's name. It was Hyrum Broderick. Asked about him, Keegan said only, "He gave me privileges that night without a question. That's all I'm going to say about him this month."
Nikki, on the gurney, had one condition. "I told them nobody else was operating on me," she said. "I was suing her, and I wouldn't let anyone else touch me. Make of that what you want. I've had years to."
"I found my mojo in that operating room," Keegan said. "I'd lost it in New York. I didn't know that until I got it back."
The rest of what almost kept them apart was Willow. She had an apartment up three flights of stairs, a brown tabby named Ripple, a bus pass, and no job. Keegan had a suit for every day of the week. Willow was sure a woman like that would get off the train at Penn Station and forget her.
"I was proud and I was broke," Willow said. "Those two things don't go together well."
"I'd already made my mistake," Keegan said. "I made it at fourteen. My daddy dragged me off that train and I never got one word with her after, and then I let 26 years go by without fixing that."
Willow will tell you she cried more than once on the way back east. Keegan will tell you she deserved it.
Where they've ended up
Keegan didn't ask the question in a restaurant. She rented the wildlife park, the whole park, for a day, 26 years to the day after the first train, and asked on that train, in Old English, because there is a story behind the Old English that the two of them will not explain to company.
"'Marry me, mine sweet Willow Mae,'" Willow said. "That's what she said. I'm not going to tell you what I said, because it was mostly crying."
Then they drove to Keegan's parents' house. Her mother, Georgia Belle, poured sweet tea on the patio among the azaleas and noticed the ring before anyone mentioned it. Her father, Harper, thin and unwell in his easy chair, took a minute to place the woman his daughter had brought home.
"I told him he'd met her before," Keegan said. "On the train at the park. Twenty-six years ago that day. The day he broke my shoulder."
He apologized. To Willow, and then to her.
"It took him a long while," Keegan said. "He did it."
They married in a courtroom in Manhattan and moved to Utah eight months later, because Afton Memorial couldn't recruit a surgeon and had one who already knew where the light switches were. Willow, who does not drive, gets around town on a purple scooter that was, she says, "a compromise that turned out well." Nikki gave New York a year without them and then moved to Dallin too, "because who was I going to have dinner with?" Readers know the rest of that story, or they know the wedding at the bottom of Teardrop Canyon, which is the same thing. Her wife, Dak Dawson, is the physician assistant at Dallin Family Practice, which Nikki says is "convenient, because I never have to make an appointment."
"The three of us have Wednesday dinner," Willow said. "Four, when Dak's home. Nikki cooks and complains about it."
"I complain about a lot of things," Nikki said. "I have never once complained about Wednesday."
Today Dr. Keegan Wade is Chief of Surgery at Afton Memorial. Willow Wade is a social worker at the same hospital and president of the county's Child Advocacy Board. Their daughter, Maggie, came to them by adoption and has opinions about everything, which her mothers consider a family trait. Ripple is still with them, older and rounder, and has been wrapped in a towel like a burrito more times than he'd like the town to know.
Willow said the thing she says to Keegan most mornings, and has since the train. "You're a sight for sore eyes."
Asked for advice, the two of them looked at each other.
"Get on the train," Keegan said.
"And if somebody drags you off it," Willow said, "find your way back. Sooner than we did."
"Buy the tickets," Nikki said. "Somebody has to buy the tickets."
Photo: Willow and Keegan Wade at home. Caption: The Wades, with Ripple, who did not consent to the photograph. (Chronicle photo)
Next issue on the Romance Beat: Melanie and Mags, now that half of Dallin has heard the serenade.