The Seat on the Branson Bus

What Kaylee saw

I gave Kaylee her bath that night and put her in her flannel pajamas with the foxes on them, and I sat on the edge of her bed to read the same library book we’d read four nights running.

Halfway through, she put her hand flat on the page to stop me. She does that when she has something on her mind that’s bigger than the book.

“Mama,” she said, “Grandma watches the bus leave.”

“What bus, baby?”

“The big white bus. At church. It comes real early, and the ladies get on, and Grandma stands at her kitchen window and watches it go away.”

Bev’s little house sits right across the county road from our church. You can see the whole parking lot from her kitchen sink. I’d never once thought about that.

“Does she?” I said.

Kaylee nodded with her whole head. “Today she did. She had her coffee and she watched it go all the way down the road. And I asked her why she doesn’t get on it with Aunt Cheryl and Aunt Lori.”

“What did she say?”

Kaylee frowned, trying to get it exactly right, the way children do when they know a thing matters. “She said nobody ever asks her. And then she said, let’s make pancakes.”

I sat there on the edge of the bed with the library book open on my lap, and something in my chest turned over.

Three years. Thirty-some trips. Her own two daughters ran that bus out of the parking lot across the road from her house, and in three years they had never once put their mother’s name on the list.

Bev was seventy. She had been a widow four years, since Don’s heart gave out in the spring hay field and Jake found him sitting against the baler like he was resting.

She hadn’t been anywhere since. Not for fun. She went to church and to the grocery store and to her heart doctor in Springfield, which Cheryl drove her to. That was the whole size of her world.

I kissed Kaylee and turned off her lamp, and I went out to the kitchen, where Jake was eating cold cornbread over the sink.

“I know what I’m doing with the seat,” I said.

The check

On Thursday I wrote Cheryl a check for $160 out of our household account. In the memo line I wrote Branson seat, Oct 17.

I drove it over to her place on my lunch break and put it in her mailbox.

Then I texted her: Check’s in your mailbox for the 17th. She wrote back within the hour: Thanks. Knew you’d come around. I didn’t answer that. There wasn’t anything good to say to it.

Wednesday is my day off. On Wednesday morning, after I dropped Kaylee at school, I drove over to Bev’s with a coffee cake I’d picked up from the bakery on the square, because I can’t make a coffee cake worth eating.

She opened the door before I knocked. She was still in her housecoat.

She looked at the coffee cake, and then at me, and I could see her deciding whether to be cool or be polite. Polite won. It always does with Bev.

“Come in, then,” she said. “I’ve got coffee on.”

Her kitchen smelled like coffee and Pine-Sol. The curtains over the sink were the yellow ones with little roosters, and through them I could see the empty church parking lot across the road, wet from the rain.

We sat at her table. She cut the coffee cake into squares and put one on a saucer for each of us, and neither of us touched it. She poured the coffee and waited. Bev is good at waiting.