The Aide Who Drove Ludie to the Ocean

The headline said Bus 14 Driver Gives the Atlantic Her Feet. Under it, Frankie Dillard had written eleven hundred words. She quoted Lyle in them, with his permission, which he gave her on Wednesday night without being asked twice.

There were one thousand one hundred and forty names on the petition by then. Patti Sizemore had carried a clipboard through the Food Lion, two churches, and the barber shop. Tommy Ray Gaskins had seen the photograph on the Courier’s web page and signed from Virginia Beach, with a note that said only, Tell her it was our honor.

At ten o’clock on Thursday morning, a gray Ford with a dent in the tailgate pulled into my driveway.

I stood at the screen door in my robe with a dish towel in my hand. Lyle Brannock came up the walk slowly, with the Courier folded under one arm and a cream envelope held in front of him in both hands.

“She left this on my desk,” he said. “I have read it eleven times.”

I let him in. Pete was at the table with his coffee, and he stood up, looked at Lyle, and sat back down without a word.

Lyle did not take the chair I offered. He held out the envelope, and then, when I did not take it, he unfolded the paper himself and read it to me, because I think he needed to hear it out loud.

Dear Lyle Wayne.

You sat three seats back on my bus with a sack lunch in your lap and a bloody nose, and I never once put you off. I am asking you the same favor in return.

I am a woman who never asked this place for one thing in four years. I asked for the ocean and Joelle gave it to me, and I would do it again with my last breath, which is about what it cost.

If you fire that girl you may as well fire me. I have already gone.

Ludie Dot Cobb

He folded it again along the creases.

“I did what I did for a reason,” he said, to the floor. “I want you to hear it. Not so you’ll forgive it. So you’ll know it was not nothing.”

I sat down across from him.

“In the spring of 2019 we had a resident named Annette Tolliver. She was eighty-eight. Her church was having a covered dish supper, the first she’d been invited to in two years. An aide who loved her took her in her own car, without telling anyone.”

I did not say anything.

“Annette fell in the church parking lot. She broke her hip, and she was gone in three weeks.” His voice was very flat. “The state came in and wrote us up. They fined us twenty-two thousand dollars and we almost lost the license. Sixty-one people almost lost their jobs, because one aide did one kind thing.”

“And you wrote four-twelve,” I said.

“I wrote it the same night at the kitchen table. I thought I was saving the building.” He looked up. “Annette’s daughter stood in my office and said, you let her go out. I have heard her say it every single day since.”

I thought of the sack lunch, and the bloody nose in 1983, and a bus driver who never said a word about it.

“I carried that woman’s chair across the threshold Saturday night,” Lyle said, “and she told me she saw the ocean. And I stood in my own parking lot and understood I had been calling a wall a policy for six years.”