The Seat on the Branson Bus

“Bev,” I said, “I’ve got a seat on the Branson bus a week from Saturday, and I can’t use it. It’s paid for. Would you take it?”

She set her cup down so slowly it didn’t make a sound on the saucer.

“The girls didn’t ask me,” she said.

“I know,” I said. “I’m asking you.”

She looked at me, and then she looked out the window at the parking lot, and she didn’t say anything for a long time.

The clock over the stove ticked. A truck went by on the county road.

“Cheryl said you didn’t want to go with them,” she said finally. “She said you’d turned them down twice and you thought their trip was beneath you.”

“I turned them down twice because I work Saturdays,” I said. “I told them that both times. I’d go if I could. I’m sorry you were told something else.”

I didn’t say anything more about Cheryl than that. I’d decided in the car I wasn’t going to. She was Bev’s daughter.

Whatever was going on with her, it wasn’t my place to make her mother think less of her at her own kitchen table.

Bev turned her cup a quarter turn on the saucer. “You work Saturdays,” she said slowly, like she was saying it to herself. “Of course you do. I keep your baby on Saturdays. I don’t know why I believed it.”

“Because your daughter told you,” I said. “That’s why. Anybody would.”

Don’s promise

She got up and went to the counter and stood with her back to me for a minute. When she turned around she had a folded paper towel in her hand, and her eyes were wet.

“Don always said we’d go to Branson after the calves sold,” she said. “Every fall. Every single fall for forty-four years. After the calves sell, Bev, we’ll go see a show. And then there’d be a tractor to fix, or hay to buy, or one of the kids needed something.”

“Did you ever go?”

“Once. Our first year married. We stayed in a motel with a swimming pool shaped like a kidney bean, and he spilled a chocolate malt on my good skirt.”

She laughed, and then the laugh caught on something. “That was 1975.”

“Then you’re overdue,” I said.

She sat back down. She looked at the coffee cake like she’d never seen one before. “What would I even wear?” she said. “I haven’t been on a trip in so long, I don’t know what people wear.”

“Your Sunday hat,” I said. “The navy one with the little brim. You look so nice in that hat.”

She laughed again, a real laugh this time, and then she put the paper towel up to her eyes and cried a little, and I reached across the table and held her other hand while she did.

“Four years,” she said, when she could. “I sit at that window every month and watch it go. I tell myself I’m too old for a three-hour bus ride. That’s not why. Nobody asked me, and you don’t want to push in where you’re not wanted.”

“You’re wanted,” I said. “I’m asking.”

She squeezed my hand so hard her rings pressed into my fingers. “Then I’ll go,” she said. “Lord help me, I’ll go to Branson.”