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Show 170 Red spent a couple days with Helen making arrangements for her to follow him out to San Diego where a couple days later, after a bus ride in the opposite direction to Buffalo, he got sent on a train with a whole trainful of Marine recruits from everywhere east of Erie and north of Philadelphia, not xx nearly as rough looking a bunch as the guys who worked in the Forge. The train went back through Erie, though it didn't stop, and Red watched the train station go by and looked over the bridge down onto xxixxxxxaai State Street, the main street, and over the bridge onto Celebration Avenue and thought about what Helen was doing, he pictured her in the bank office where he'd never seen her and thought about her sleeping alone that night next to that giant place where he wasn't and deep inside where he i always got that warm calm feeling he instead felt some kind of naked ache and that's the only time he came close to crying during the xx war. After that, whenever he £ix felt himself getting sad he thought about eating lunch and all the future lunches waiting for xiaa him, one lunch for each day, an endless string of lunches with a whole hour to eat xxx them. Lunch sure did make Red happy. And it became his favorite meal, which is saying a lot because meals were one of Red's favorite things in the world. Later on Red always made a big deal about supper, wanting everybody there sitting around the table like a wonderful family, that was important to him, but supper made him nervous because he had to watch all the food get divied up and even if Helen served him first and gave him the xi£ biggest portion he could never be sure there"' x be anything left after everybody else got theirs. And there was just something wrong about breakfast, kaxwakaxxxxxxmBaixixi there wasn't enough time to look forward to it, he had to xx get up and eat and go to work and he couldn't wake up early just to think about it, that xaa seemed a waste of ixxax time, besides he'd wake up too hungry. But lunch Red could look forward too all morning, which he did with tremendous relish now that he didn't have to fight the Union's dirty man, and what he got xx was all his and he didn't have to share it and usually lunch came in the form of sandwiches which he could eat with his hands in as few bites as he wished. This is the kind of stuff Red though about on the train. He didn't think about &xi Cleveland or Chicago or tho plains of Nebraska and kaaxak Kansas or the |