The Seat on the Branson Bus

Nobody said a thing. Cheryl was looking at the floor of the bus. Lori had both hands pressed together in front of her mouth.

“I was told Amanda thought she was too good for this trip,” Bev said. “And I believed it, and I shut my door on her, and I am ashamed of that. Amanda, I’m sorry, honey. I am.”

I couldn’t say anything. I just nodded up at her. My eyes were stinging in the cold.

Then she turned to her daughters, and her voice got softer, not harder. That’s the thing I’ll remember. She didn’t scold. She sounded like a woman telling her girls something she should have told them years ago.

“And I want my girls to know,” she said, “I would have come any month. Any month at all. I watched this bus leave from my kitchen window for three years. All you ever had to do was ask me.”

She stood there a second more. Then she said, “That’s all,” and turned around and sat down in the very front seat, right behind the driver, and set her purse on her lap.

For a minute nobody moved. Then Marlene Fisher got up from the fourth row and came up the aisle and sat down next to her.

“Well, scoot over, Bev,” she said. “You’re not riding up here by yourself.”

Somebody laughed, a nice laugh, and then somebody else did, and the bus started to sound like a bus again.

Cheryl turned and walked back to the third row without a word. Lori stood in the aisle a second longer, looking at her mother, and then she followed her sister.

The driver looked at me and raised his eyebrows. I stepped back.

The door folded shut with a hiss, and the bus pulled out of the lot and onto the county road, and the last thing I saw was a navy hat in the front window and a hand waving.

I stood in the parking lot until it was out of sight.

Then I got in my car and changed into my scrubs in the church lot, which I had never done before in my life, and drove to work.

The longest Saturday

It was a busy Saturday at the drugstore. Flu shot season. Dale and I gave twenty-two shots between eight and two and I don’t remember one bit of it.

I kept thinking about Cheryl’s face. Not the angry part. The part right at the end, when her mother said all you ever had to do was ask.

Something had cracked in her face then, and she’d turned to the floor so nobody would see it.

I didn’t hear a word from anybody all day. No texts. I picked Kaylee up from the field at two-thirty, where Jake had her bundled up on the truck seat with a juice box and a cattle catalog she was reading upside down.

“How’d it go,” Jake said through the window.

“Your mom gave a speech,” I said.

He took his cap off and put it back on. “Mom did?”

“Your mom. On the top step of the bus. In front of everybody.”

He was quiet a second. Then he grinned, slow, the first time all week. “Dad always said she had it in her,” he said. “He said she just never had a reason.”