The Bus My Son Came Home On

I kept my hands on my own knees.

“Where was your uncle Rick?”

“At the marina. He took the pontoon in, something with the prop. He’d been gone since breakfast. He didn’t know.”

“Did anybody say anything?”

“Josh said, ‘Mom.’ That’s all. She told him to hush.” He swallowed. “Megan carried my bag out to the car. She was crying a little. I told her it was okay.”

Of course he did.

“And then she drove you to Columbia.”

“Yeah. It’s like an hour and fifteen minutes. She bought the ticket at the counter and said the bus was at 3:45, and she had eight people to feed supper, so she couldn’t wait around.” He shrugged, a small tight shrug. “It was like 2:30.”

“She left you there. An hour and a quarter before the bus.”

“I had my phone.”

“How much money did you have?”

He pulled it out of his hoodie pocket to show me. Four one-dollar bills, soft as cloth.

“I had forty when I got to the lake. From mowing. But the little cousins wanted ice cream at the marina on Monday, and then Tuesday we needed bait.” He looked at the bills. “I didn’t want to spend these in case I needed them for something.”

It is nearly three hundred miles from her dock to my driveway by the short way, and the bus does not go the short way. It is a regional line that runs Columbia to Kansas City and then out the interstate, and fifteen is the youngest it will carry alone. Dropped off at 2:30, a 3:45 bus, Kansas City at six, a two and a half hour layover, out again at 8:30, Salina at 11:40. Nine hours, and he had held on to four dollars the whole way in case of something worse.

“Dad?” he said. “Am I not one of them? I thought I was. I’ve known them my whole life.”

“You are your grandmother’s grandson,” I said. “You are Megan and Josh’s first cousin by blood, which is more than half that porch can say about each other. You were lied to today by a grown woman who knew better. That is a thing wrong with her afternoon. It is not a thing wrong with you.”

He nodded. He did not look convinced.

So I did the only other thing I could think to do. I opened the glove box and got out a pen and one of my work orders, and I turned it over to the blank side.

“All right,” I said. “Now I want the other half of today.”

“What other half?”

“Mrs. Miller did not get on that bus by accident and feed you by accident. Somebody let you charge your phone. I want the name of every person who was kind to you between Columbia and that door. Every one. Start at the beginning, and eat while you talk.”

He looked at me like I had lost my mind. Then he peeled the lid off the chicken.