The Seat on the Branson Bus

Jake backs it

I told Jake that night while he was washing up. He stood at the bathroom sink with soap to his elbows and listened to the whole thing without interrupting.

When I got to the part about the kidney bean swimming pool, he stopped washing. He stood there with the water running. “Dad never told me that,” he said.

“She said that was 1975.”

He shut the water off and dried his hands for a long time. “Forty-four years he said after the calves sell,” he said. “And I watched him say it. I never once thought about whether she minded.” He looked at me in the mirror. “Mom’s riding,” he said. “I’ll keep Kaylee Saturday.”

“You’ve got calves to feed.”

“She’ll ride along in the truck. She likes it. She can open the gates.” He hung up the towel. “You want me there when the bus loads? I’ll come stand with you.”

I’d thought about that. “No,” I said. “If you’re standing in that parking lot, it looks like you came to have it out with your sisters. I want it to look like what it is. A daughter-in-law putting her mother on a bus.”

He nodded slowly. He didn’t like it, but he understood it. “All right,” he said. “But that porch step of hers is loose. I’m not having her break a hip at six in the morning.”

Friday evening he went over to his mother’s with his toolbox and a new treated two-by-twelve in the bed of the truck, and he pulled the old step and put the new one down and screwed it in tight.

Bev called me twice that night. The first time she wanted to know how much cash to bring for the gift shop.

The second time she wanted to know whether the show had an intermission, because she didn’t want to have to get up in the middle of a song.

I told her forty dollars would be plenty and that I’d heard they always had an intermission.

The parking lot

Saturday morning I was up at five-thirty. I put my scrubs and my work shoes in a bag on the passenger seat, pulled on jeans and my light gray hoodie, put my hair back in a low ponytail, and kissed Jake and my sleeping daughter goodbye.

It was cold, the first real crisp morning of the fall. I pulled into Bev’s drive at a quarter to seven, and she was already standing on the porch on Jake’s new step, with her purse over her arm.

She had on the navy Sunday hat with the little brim, and a red cardigan buttoned all the way to the top, and her good church shoes.

Her short silver hair was curled under the hat brim. She looked like a girl on the first day of school.

“I’ve been up since four,” she said, getting into the car. “I couldn’t sleep a wink. Isn’t that silly? Seventy years old.”

“It’s not silly,” I said.

It’s a quarter mile to the church lot. I could have walked her, but I didn’t want her to tire out before the day started.

I parked at the edge of the lot, and we sat in the car one second while she checked her purse.

The bus was already there, a big white charter coach idling by the little brick church, with the door folded open.

The maples behind the church had all turned, red and orange, and the low sun was just coming through them.

I walked her across the lot to the door. The steps on those coaches are steep, so I took her arm at the elbow and put my other hand at her back, and she put one good shoe on the first step.