The Lawn Chair at the Bus Stop
He is not a man who says a lot. He stood in my driveway with his hands in his jacket pockets and looked over at Mrs. Harlan’s porch for a long time.
“That chair’s going to fold up on her,” he said finally. “The webbing’s rotted on the left side. I saw it Thursday when I drove by.”
Before he left with Lexi, he went out to his truck, came back with a roll of new nylon webbing and a box of screws he keeps in the toolbox, and knocked on her door.
He sat on her porch steps for forty minutes and rewebbed that old aluminum chair, weaving it tight and even, while Mrs. Harlan sat in the porch swing and told him every single thing she remembered about his own first-grade year, which, it turned out, was a lot.
“You were a biter,” she told him.
“I was not.”
“You bit Jimmy Ross on the arm over a red crayon. I have it written down.”
Lexi thought this was the funniest thing she had ever heard. She laughed so hard she got the hiccups, and Jeff laughed too, and kept working.
When he finished, he flipped the chair open, sat in it to test it, and stood back up.
“That’ll hold you till spring,” he told her. “I’ll check it again then.”
“See that you do,” she said.
In the truck, before he drove off, he rolled the window down. “Court,” he said. “Have you talked to Ash?”
“No.”
He nodded. “She’s working at the Tap. Days. My buddy saw her there.”
I didn’t know what to do with that, so I didn’t do anything. I just waved them off and went inside.
The third week of the bus, on a Wednesday, Dr. Miller’s 3:00 cancelled, and his 4:00 called to say her car wouldn’t start. He looked at the empty book and said, “Go home, Courtney. Go see your girl get off the bus.”
So I did.
It was a sunny September afternoon, the kind we get in southern Indiana right before the leaves turn, warm in the sun and cool in the shade. I parked at my house and walked down the sidewalk toward the corner in my scrubs, not even changing, because I wanted to see it.
The yellow bus was just pulling away down our street, under all those big maples. Mrs. Harlan was in her lawn chair in her light blue cardigan with a picture book open on her lap. Lexi was on the curb beside her with her pink backpack still on, leaning over to read along.
They didn’t see me yet. I was smiling so hard my face hurt.
And that is when my sister’s car turned the corner and slowed down.
I don’t know if she meant to stop. I think, now, that she drove that street every day on her way back from the Tap, and that she had been driving it slow every day for two weeks, and looking.
But that day she saw me too. Standing on the sidewalk, ten steps from the bus stop. And she pulled over to the curb and turned off the car and sat there.
Lexi looked up from the book. “Aunt Ashley!” she yelled, and waved with her whole arm.
My sister got out of the car. She was in a black T-shirt with the Corner Tap’s name on the back and her hair pulled up, and she looked tired in a way I had not let myself notice in August. She looked at the lawn chair, and the book, and the paper sack of pretzels, and my daughter on the curb.