A Love Letter to the Midwest

How can we go back and do it all again?   

A neurodivergent ticket agent struggling with his ended marriage, a willful teenager searching for truth about her past, and a teacher harboring a painful regret: each passes through the Wisconsin train station one Friday in 1970.  Their encounters, seemingly serendipitous, are anything but accidental - yet none of them realize how the course of their lives have been determined by the others.   

For years, the depot has offered Lincoln an escape from his troubled past. But now, with the train line left in question - and in an era when disorders like his are often left undiagnosed - Lincoln must search for new ways to understand who he is.

Rose, his fierce and faithful mother, has orchestrated her son’s life for years.  In her close inner circle is the secretary who helped uncover devastating corruption at their psychology office.  Now, the exposing of long-hidden secrets means facing life-changing choices - some seeped in regret.  

Both somber and uplifting, unsettling and still, the healing of Lincoln and those he encounters builds in pace like the train at the heart of the story - and arrives at the destination of a gut-wrenching dilemma: How do we make peace with time?

Heather Tierney is the author of If The Train Arrives (Vine Leaves Books) and The Freedom of a Tangled Vine (Wise Ink Press).  She is a content contributor for Grown and Flown, Moms of Teens and Tweens, Motherly, and Your Teen.  Heather teaches high school and college-credit Literature and Composition courses. 

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