The Road

The ticket cost three dollars. I gave the driver five and he gave me two ones back and a transfer I did not need, and I put the transfer in my coat pocket with the schedule.

The bus went south and then east and the driver called the stops over the speaker and I did not know one of them. I had the schedule folded in my pocket, and a schedule is a list of places a person can get to, which is not the same thing as a plan, and at twenty it is close enough. I put my head against the glass and I slept, which I had not done in three nights.

He woke me with the lights. It was ten past nine and the sign over the door of the depot said Welden, and he said this is the end of the line, everybody out. Six people got off. I was the last one, because I was looking for my bag.

The bag was black canvas with my clothes in it and the funeral program from December and one envelope I had carried out of a drawer on Ridge Lane. It was in the rack over my seat and I had stood up and the driver had said move along, and I got off onto the pavement and turned around, and the bus had already pulled out with the doors shut and my bag in the window over the third seat, going back west.

The depot window had a shade down and a sign in the glass that said hours, Monday through Friday, and it was Thursday. The schedule on the wall said the next bus east was Monday at seven. I read it twice, because the first time I did not believe it.

I stood in the lot for a while. There was a light on over the gas station across the square and one at the laundromat and the rest of the town was dark. I had twenty dollars in my coat and the clothes I was standing in. I was not frightened, and the reason was arithmetic. Being frightened requires the belief that a thing can be changed by feeling. In that cold, on that pavement, in that town, the only two facts that mattered were twenty dollars and the temperature.

The bus shelter by the gas station had a bench and two sides and no heat. I sat in the corner of it with my knees against the wall and I put the schedule inside my shirt, because paper on the outside of a person gets wet, and I slept in pieces.

In the morning I found a restroom in the laundromat and washed my face and put my hair up with the same two pins. I asked about work at the supermarket and was pointed at an office door that was locked, with a sign that said hiring Tuesdays, and I did not go back.

At the convenience store I bought a coffee and two of the sandwiches that sit in the case, which came to six dollars and twenty-five cents. A man at the pump asked me for a cigarette and I said I did not smoke and he asked me for money and I said no, and then he asked a second man to come over and the two of them stood in front of me, and I took five dollars out of my coat and gave it to the first one and he said God bless, and they went. That was five dollars to be left alone, which is the cheapest rent I have ever paid.

The second night I sat on the steps of a church on the square. The light over the door was on a timer. It went off at nine and came on again at half past six and in between there was nothing to look at but the street and the two doors across it and a dog that slept under a parked car. I had a loaf of bread by then and I ate the end of it and I did not sleep much, and at some point in the night I did the inventory, the way I have always done it, and the inventory said: one coat, one loaf, eight dollars and seventy-five cents, one bus schedule, one body at normal temperature.

On the third day I went into the diner on the square at four in the afternoon and asked the woman behind the counter if I could wash dishes for a bowl of soup. She looked at my hands and then at my face and said the insurance would not let anybody but staff go in the back. Then she went to the stove and came back with a bowl of vegetable soup and a roll and a dish of butter, and she put them down in front of me and tore the ticket in half in front of me, and I ate all of it and did not talk, because I had learned by then that people who give you food do not want a conversation, they want you to eat while it is hot.

That night I did not go back to the church. I went the other way, past the fairgrounds and up a road with mailboxes on one side, and I picked the white house at the top because of the woodpile. The top row was split small, the way people split it when somebody in that house has to carry it in. There was a dog on a chain that stood up but did not bark, and two cars in the drive, and a kitchen light and a porch light, and I stood at the end of the walk for a minute and got my breathing level, because I had decided some things about how I was going to ask.

A woman came to the door in blue scrubs with her coat half on and keys in her hand, and she looked at me for about four seconds and said, “Come in out of that.”

Her name was Dee Vaughn and she was a nurse and she was already late. She put me in a chair at the kitchen table and turned the burner on under a pot of soup that was already on the stove, which is a thing that happens in a house where three adults work different shifts. She took off my right boot without asking and looked at my toes and said they were fine, and went upstairs and came back with dry socks and a towel.

While I ate she sat across from me and did not ask me anything. When the bowl was empty she said, “How long.”

I said, “Three days.”

She said, “You eat that and then you tell me whether you have a place to go,” and then her brother came in from the barn.

He was twenty-nine and had a beard that was colder than he was and he washed his hands at the sink with his back to me and said, “What is your name.”

I said, “Ruth.”

He waited. He dried his hands the whole time he waited, which is a long time if you are counting, and I counted it, and then he said, “Ruth what.”

I said, “Ruth is enough for now.”

He looked at me the way a man looks at a bill he intends to pay later. Then he said, “That is a straight answer to a question I did not ask,” and he asked me where I had come from, and I said east of here, and he said that was not what he had asked, and he went out again.

Dee put me in the room over the kitchen. There was a bed with a quilt that had been made by somebody’s hands and not bought, and a window that looked down on the barn roof and the woodpile. I got into the bed at seven in the evening and I did not wake up until nine the next morning, and in between I dreamed of a window. I was on the inside of it and the latch turned in my hand. That is all it was. It was not a sign of anything. It was a window, and a hand, and the hand was mine.

The bag came back on Monday on a bus from a depot fourteen miles west. Everything was in it, including the envelope, and nothing had been taken, and I have never been able to work out why, and I have stopped trying.