The Seat on the Branson Bus

My mother-in-law met me at her kitchen door with her arms folded, and that was how I knew something was wrong before she said a single word to me.

Bev Voss had kept our daughter every Saturday for two years. Every Saturday at a quarter past two, I pulled into her gravel drive, and every Saturday she met me at the door with a cookie bag.

That Saturday there was no cookie bag. Kaylee came out past her grandmother with her pink backpack on both shoulders, and Bev stayed in the doorway, one hand on the frame.

“Cheryl tells me you think you’re too good to ride a bus with us,” she said. She didn’t raise her voice. Bev never raised her voice about anything, which made it worse.

I stood on her porch step in my pharmacy scrubs with my keys in my hand and tried to understand what she meant. For a second I honestly thought she was teasing me.

“I work Saturdays, Bev,” I said. “You know I work Saturdays. You’re the one who keeps Kaylee while I do it.”

She looked at me for a long moment, the way she looked at a cow that had gotten through a fence and was pretending it hadn’t. Then she said, “That’s what I hear,” and shut the door.

Not hard. Bev wouldn’t slam a door if the house were on fire. She just closed it, gently, and I heard the latch click, and I stood there on the step holding my keys.

Kaylee tugged at my scrub top. “Mama, Grandma didn’t give me cookies,” she said, and her lip was starting to go, because she’s six and the cookie bag is one of the fixed points of her week.

“She must have run out, baby,” I said. “We’ll get some at the store.” I buckled her into her booster seat and drove home with my hands tight on the wheel the whole three miles.

The trip

I should explain the bus. For three years I had thought of it as a nice thing my husband’s sisters did for the ladies in town.

Cheryl Voss Ott is forty-five and Lori Voss Hahn is forty-two.

They are Jake’s older sisters, and between them they have organized more church dinners, school fundraisers and baby showers than anyone in our corner of southwest Missouri.

Three years ago they started a monthly ladies’ bus trip. Cheryl books a charter coach out of Springfield, and it loads in our church parking lot on a Saturday morning and runs three hours down to Branson for a matinee show.

The seat price covers the bus, the show ticket and a buffet lunch.

That fall it was $160 a seat, which is about what those trips cost anywhere around here. Women came from three or four churches. Some months they filled the coach.

I had never gone. Not once. I work at the drugstore on the square, and on Saturdays it is one pharmacist and me from eight until two.

If I’m gone, the line backs up to the greeting cards and old Mr. Carlson waits an hour for his heart pills.

Cheryl asked me the first time at Jake’s birthday supper in August.

She’d brought a coconut cake, and while we were cutting it she said, “You ought to come to Branson with us in October. It’s a good show.”

“I’d love to, but I work Saturdays,” I said. “Dale can’t run the counter by himself on a Saturday. Maybe someday when I’m off.” Cheryl said, “Mm,” and handed me a plate.

The second time was Lori, at the Dollar General in September. She was buying paper plates by the case for something, and she said, “Cheryl says you’re thinking about the October trip.”

“I’m not, Lori,” I said. “I told her. I work Saturdays. I’d go if I could.” Lori nodded and said she’d tell her, and I went home and didn’t think about it again.

Two weeks later my phone buzzed on the counter while I was making supper. It was Cheryl. The text said: Your seat’s held for the 17th. $160 by Friday. The bus company charges us per seat.

I read it three times. Then I wrote back: Cheryl, I told you and Lori both I can’t go. I work that Saturday. Please give it to someone else. She didn’t answer that night or the next day.

I figured that was the end of it. I figured she’d been busy and sent the text to a list without looking.

That’s what I told myself until I stood on Bev’s porch step without a cookie bag.