Original fiction · Chapter 1 of 2
The Mitten on Route 17
On my last night driving Route 17, I found a red mitten under a seat with a bus pass sewn into the cuff.
The pass had expired fifteen years earlier. I recognized the orange stripe because that was the winter the city changed printers and all the cards came out a little crooked. For months people complained that the date rubbed off in their wallets.
I parked at the terminus and checked the rest of the seats. The bus was empty. The dispatcher had already called to ask whether I wanted anyone at the depot when I turned in my keys. I told her I'd rather go home and put the kettle on.
I'd driven the same route for twenty-eight years. I knew what people left behind when they were tired: lunch boxes, a single glove, envelopes with rent money folded inside. A bus pass sewn into a mitten was different. Somebody had taken care to make it hard to lose.
The name on the pass was Lena Ortiz. I remembered her father first. He used to run for the bus holding her backpack by one strap while she trotted along behind him. On Thursdays he worked late, so Lena got on with a woman from the bakery and sat up front with me until her stop. She could count all the traffic lights between the library and her apartment without looking up.
One winter morning, she got on without the bakery woman. She had only one mitten. I asked her where the other one was and she started crying so hard she couldn't tell me. I had a spare pair in my lunch bag. I gave them to her at the library and told her to bring them back whenever she wanted.
She never did. A month later she stopped riding. I heard her father had found work in another city and assumed they'd moved together.
The red mitten under the seat was small enough to fit a child. The stitches around the cuff were new and white. On the back of the pass, where there should have been a transit office phone number, someone had taped a strip of paper.
Library. 7:10. Please come inside this time.
I checked the clock. It was 6:54.
The library was closed for renovations, as far as I knew. I drove my car over anyway. A light was on in the room where they used to hold story hour. Standing in the doorway was a girl in a red hat, holding the other mitten.
She watched me cross the sidewalk, then looked back into the room.
“Mom,” she said. “He found the one you left.”
