Original fiction · Chapter 2 of 2
A Seat in the Front Row
Lena stood up from the little table in the library. For a second I recognized her father in the way she held the back of her chair while she got her balance.
“Seven minutes early,” she said.
“I can't help it.”
Her daughter laughed. She'd saved me a seat in the front row. There were five chairs in it, and the room behind us was almost empty.
Lena told me her father hadn't taken a job in another city. He'd gone into the hospital that winter and she had gone to stay with her aunt. The adults at the time told her to leave the explaining to them. She supposed every adult who'd known her thought somebody else had explained.
I set the mitten on the table. “How did it get on the bus?”
“I took the late run yesterday and left it where my daughter said you'd look.”
Her daughter shook her head. “Where you said he always looked.”
Lena pulled an envelope from her coat. Inside was a photograph from a school assembly. She was standing at a microphone, her hands inside a pair of mittens too large for her. I recognized the gray yarn. My wife had made those for me when we lived in a drafty upstairs apartment and neither of us knew how long I'd be driving buses.
“The day you gave them to me, I was meant to read a poem here,” Lena said. “I'd practiced for weeks. I was going to go home because I couldn't stop crying. Then you told me I could keep the mittens until I felt like taking them off. I wore them through the whole reading.”
I remembered saying it. I didn't remember thinking about the words first.
The girl in the red hat was reading a poem of her own that night. The library had opened the old story room for a small rehearsal while the rest of the building was being repaired. Lena had tried to invite me fifteen years earlier, she said. She'd stood by the bus door and asked if I wanted to come inside. I'd said I couldn't leave a bus at the curb. She'd taken that answer literally, the way children are sometimes kinder than adults.
Her daughter read a poem about missing a school bus and getting a lift from a neighbor who played the radio too loud. Halfway through she lost her place. She glanced at her mother. Lena held up both hands and waited. The girl found the line herself.
Afterward I handed her the expired pass. She asked if I was sure. I said she'd earned it by finding a place I hadn't been looking.
On Monday morning, I went to the stop out of habit. A driver I recognized from the depot slowed down and opened the doors. I climbed in with my regular shoes on, carrying the book Lena had given me.
There was an empty seat beside a man with a bag of oranges on his lap. I sat down. For the first time in twenty-eight years, I got to see what the river looked like out of the right-hand window.
