The envelope of butter yellow arrived on a cold November day. The air had a bite as Penny trudged to the mailbox, the snow crunching beneath her boots, creating a path to and fro.

She didn’t even notice it at first, thumbing through the usual stack of junk, a utility bill, and a few flyers advertising holiday sales, humming to herself as walked through the enclosed front porch, through the living room, and into the kitchen.

But then, the golden hue caught her eye and she stopped, next to the small secretary desk where she had once done her homework and now did her paperwork and the occasional doodle. Among the flotsam were several pens, their caps showing the telltale marks of being held in her mouth as she chewed and contemplated.

She slid her index finger along the underside of the envelope, wincing as she felt the paper grab and then cut into the side of the unsuspecting digit.

The words on the single piece of folded paper blotted out the smart and she slid into the cane-backed chair before the desk.

“I can’t believe it,” she whispered, although there was no one there to hear her. Her parents had died two years prior, roughly four months apart. Her mother succumbing to cancer. Her father of a broken heart.

They had left her this house, a modest two-bedroom bungalow and the meager savings left after the medical bills had been paid.

“I won,” she said, her voice louder this time, looking from the letter in her left hand to the item in her right. It was a ticket. A shiny silver ticket that glittered in the afternoon sun streaming in from the windows.

She still did not know what had possessed her to turn on the radio that morning, except they were doing a countdown of Beatles songs and she had never been able to resist the Fab Four. Hours had passed while she did mundane household chores and baked several loaves of sourdough bread, singing along to tune after tune as she dusted, folded, and kneaded dough.

The music was interrupted by the DJ announcing an impromptu contest. The challenge was to name the last five songs they had played and the albums they came from. She reached for her cellphone without even blinking and wonder of wonders, she was the lucky seventh caller.

Luckier still, she rattled off the songs and albums in record time, the final one so fitting considering what she held in her hand.

“Ticket to ride,” she murmured, more reverence than excitement in her voice now. She smiled sardonically, only one corner of her mouth upturned.

From the Help! album.

“Help,” she scoffed. “More like manna from heaven.”

……………………………….………………………………………….

Two days later, she stood on the dusty platform of the train depot, preparing to leave the only home, the only place she had ever lived for parts unknown.

For the ticket truly was a ticket to ride. Anywhere and everywhere she wanted to go. All means of travel were at her disposal but she had opted to see the world she had she little knowledge of up close, through her own private compartment.

She had arrived at the station more than an hour before the departure time, the sun barely on the horizon, yet warming her just the same despite the blustery day, the recently-fallen snow whirling all around her.

The depot manager had taken her two suitcases and gestured for her to come inside but she had shaken her head.

She wanted, no, needed, one last long look at single traffic light town she had been born and raised in. She wanted to drink it all in like the last, best pull on a favorite soda.

She took note of Phillips’ drugstore across the street. It had an ice cream parlor in the back where she and her friends had once sipped shakes or shared enormous, gooey banana splits. Next door was Stan’s barber shop, once a favorite spot of her father’s, and still the haunt of men of a certain age in pursuit of their next chin wag.

Cattycorner was Maxine’s dress shop where her mother had helped Penny pick out a pale pink, strapless formal with a stiff black lace petticoat underneath. A bit old-fashioned for 1968, but she had preferred the style to that of the long, plain gowns she and her like-minded friends had dubbed “dowdy dresses.”

Shiny patent leather pumps were purchased at Driscoll’s store a few steps away. Bunnies and chicks and lilies had decorated the store window then. A Santa, reindeer, and elves were in residence now.

There, too, was a gold star. Placed in the lower left corner of the otherwise gay window.

Not the famed celestial body followed by the Magi over sand and sea to where the Christ child lay in a manger.

Not a symbol of new life but that of loss.

The loss of Don Driscoll’s eldest son, Tommy. The quarterback of our high school football team only one year ago. A strapping young man whose sapphire eyes and dimpled grin sent many female hearts galloping, mine included. He was the pride of the town and the talk of the men who frequented Stan’s to get their ears lowered and filled.

Instead of putting on the colors of gold and cardinal and playing on a field of artificial green, very real palm trees standing close by, he chose to put on fatigues and travel an ocean, and what seemed like a lifetime, away.

It was he that Penny waited for that balmy spring night, her reddish-blond hair swept up in a sophisticated chignon. Standing near the front door in that pink gown and black pumps, her mother’s borrowed pearls warm against her skin.

Only he never came.

He would never come again.

She can still picture her mother’s face as she answered the phone, Penny’s eyes glued to her as if she held all the wisdom in the world.

The initial knowing smile, both assuming the truck he’d planned to borrow from his grandfather to drive into town from their farmhouse ten miles away was misbehaving again. Making him a little late and nothing more.

Her smile faltered, her eyes grew wide and the tiniest bit glassy. Penny saw her swallow hard, looking up at the ceiling, and then her gaze returned to her and, in that moment, she knew.

Penny was out the door and running before she could stop me. Racing towards the very depot where now she stood.

The place where Tommy and she planned to depart someday, after they were married in the small white chapel in the center of town.

Two years had gone by. More than, nearly three now. Taking not only her first love, but also her parents, and friends who went off to college. Or to war.

Few came back. Sending the occasional postcard from parts far more exciting. Although sometimes, Western Union and its unwanted telegrams came to announce the impending arrival of another flag-draped coffin or, if the fates were kind, a boy-turned-man who was coming home.

Not quite as he had been before but better by far than a pine box.

Even the Beatles had broken up and gone their separate ways.

Just as Penny was going hers.

She sighed, brushing a wayward strand of hair out of her eyes, hearing the whistle of the train in the distance, the plume of smoke above the engine car, the tracks near her singing a tune as familiar to her as breathing.

Minutes later, she was seated in my private car, looking out across a frozen landscape. Yet as the wheels chugged beneath her in a rhythmic pattern, Penny smiled that same half-smile, knowing that she was heading into the west where sunshine and possibilities were waiting for her.