The Bus My Son Came Home On
The phone call I made, and the one I did not
I called Caleb. He picked up on the second ring, and he was whispering, the way you do on a bus full of people trying to sleep.
“Dad?”
“I’m here. I just now saw it. I’ve been on a roof since two o’clock. Where are you?”
“We left Topeka a while ago. I think the next one is Junction City.”
“Are you all right?”
“I’m fine.” A pause. “Dad, I’m sorry.”
Those three words did something to me that her whole text had not. A boy who has been put on a bus by a grown woman should not be the one apologizing.
“You don’t have one thing to be sorry for,” I said. “Not one. Do you hear me?”
“Okay.”
“Is Mrs. Miller with you?”
“She’s right here. She’s asleep. She said to wake her up at Salina, she wants to see you.”
I looked at the clock on the dash. 10:19. The bus was due in Junction City around 10:50, and Junction City is forty-eight miles from where I was parked. If I drove like a fool, I might catch it there with two minutes to spare. And if I hit one slow truck, I would pull in to an empty curb while my son stepped off in Salina, an hour later, to nobody at all.
“Listen to me,” I said. “Stay on that bus. Do not get off for anybody until Salina. When that door opens I will be standing in front of it. I will be the first thing you see.”
“Okay.”
“How’s your phone?”
“Nineteen percent. A lady at the station let me charge it some.”
“Then hang up and save it. I love you. Fifty minutes.”
“Love you too,” he whispered, and he was gone.
Then I sat and looked at my sister’s name.
Everybody asks why I did not call her that night. It was not that I am above it. I had a speech in my mouth that would have peeled paint, and I had her number under my thumb.
But I had one hour, and I knew my sister. If I called Denise, I would spend that hour in a parking lot hearing about grocery prices and what Rick’s mother had said and how hard she works to make that week nice. I would be shouting at a windshield. And my boy would step off that bus to a father who was red in the face and still on the phone about him.
He had already spent nine hours being somebody’s problem. I was not going to make him one more.
So I did not waste a minute on her that night. I put the phone face down on the passenger seat, drove home, and showered the roof off me in four minutes, because I did not want him to hug a man who smelled like a compressor. There was nothing in my refrigerator fit to feed him, so I stopped at the all-night grocery and bought a rotisserie chicken out of the warmer, a gallon of milk and a box of the cereal he likes.
I was at the bus stop at 11:05.
11:40
In Salina the bus does not come to a station. It comes to a gas station and travel store up by the interstate, and it parks along the side under the lights where the trucks fuel. There is a bench and a sign.
I stood by the bench for thirty-five minutes. Moths were hitting the lights. It was still eighty-four degrees, the kind of Kansas July night that never does cool off, and I could smell diesel and cut wheat stubble from the field across the road.
I thought about his mother. Amy has been gone four years this past March. She was the one who knew what to say. I am the one who knows how to fix what is broken if you can show me where it is.
The bus came off the ramp at 11:38, two minutes early, silver and blue. It swung in wide and the brakes let go their air.
The door folded open, and there was my son, six feet tall and a hundred and forty pounds, in the gray hoodie he wears no matter the weather, with his duffel over his shoulder. He came down the steps fast and then he stopped on the last one, as if he was not sure what kind of greeting he was going to get.