The 66 at twenty past five in the evening is not a bus, it is a container with the lid screwed on. Nobody is going anywhere and everybody is in it. Sleet on the windows. Coats that had been rained on at four o’clock and were still wet at five, and the smell of all of it together: wet wool, wet nylon, somebody’s fried food, somebody’s cigarettes, the heater burning dust.
I was standing with my back to the rear doors with one hand up on the rail, and I had been standing there since Western, and I was not going to get a seat before Austin.
At Ashland, four people got off and eleven got on and the eleven won. The last of them was a woman with shopping bags, and she came up the aisle sideways the way you have to when your arms are full, and she stopped because there was nowhere to stop, and then she backed into the three inches of floor in front of me and put her bags down between her feet.
Nobody had stood up for her. I want that on the record, because in that neighbourhood somebody usually does; but the bus was packed to the doors and there was no standing up to be done.
So I looked at her back for eleven minutes.
She was short. Five foot two, maybe five foot three in the flat shoes, and she was built the way a lot of women of that age in that part of the city are built, which is to say the body had gone its own way and she had made her peace with it and dressed it properly. The coat was navy wool, belted, brushed, the kind of coat that cost real money in 1998. Her hair had been done — set and sprayed, dark auburn going to black, the curls still holding at the back and flattened where her collar had pressed them. A tortoiseshell clip. Gold hoops the size of a nickel, and a gold chain at her neck with a medallion on it, and the chain had left a mark in the soft skin above her collar.
Her neck was soft and creased and smelled of something expensive and old-fashioned that came off her in a cloud whenever the bus rocked: powder and roses and, under it, faintly, oranges.
And her ass.
I am going to describe it because there was no way on that bus, in that crowd, at that hour, to look anywhere else. It was enormous. It came out of the small of her back at an angle, a shelf, and the navy wool was pulled tight over both halves of it and strained at the seam down the middle, and there was a shine on the fabric where ten years of sitting had polished it. Her hips were wide enough that she took up the space of two people. Under the coat the skirt — grey, wool, mid-calf — was stretched across all of it, and where it ended there was a length of support stocking, and a thick ankle, and a black lace-up shoe with a wide toe and a heel worn down on the outside.
Her legs were short and thick and she stood with her feet apart for balance, and the whole shape of her was heavy and low and settled, and I want to be honest: it did something to me that a thin woman in a tight dress on a Friday night does not do.
She had four bags. Two plastic, white, straining, with leeks sticking out of one and the corner of a yogurt tub showing through the other. A canvas bag with a broken handle that she had knotted together. And a paper bag with a wet bottom, which had oranges in it, and a bag of rice, and something frozen that was starting to sweat through.
The bus pulled out of Ashland and everybody swayed, and I put my hips back to brace myself against the door, and the front of me met the back of her.
She said, “Uf.”
Not loud. The sound a woman makes when the train lurches and her coffee spills. She turned her head over her shoulder and looked at me, and I got the whole face in one go: round, wide, sixty and not hiding it, dark eyes with the eyeliner done at seven that morning and still on, eyebrows drawn in with a pencil in a shape that had been fashionable in 1984, lipstick a dark red that had been reapplied at least twice, a fine line of dark hair on the upper lip that she had never once in her life bothered to deal with.
“You are pushing,” she said. Accent thick on the consonants. Greek, I found out later, but I did not know that then; I only knew it was not from here.
“It’s the bus,” I said. “I’m against the door.”
She looked at me for another second, to make sure I was not smiling, and then she turned back around.
The bus stopped at Damen and let on six more and did not let off anybody, and when it started again the sway was worse, and I came up against her hard enough that her hand slipped on the rail.
“Uf!” Louder this time. She turned her head again and her ear was red.
“I can’t move,” I said. “Look.”
She looked. She looked down the aisle at the wall of coats in front of her, and at her own bags pinning her feet, and at the doors behind me with two men standing against them, and she did the arithmetic and did not like the answer.
“I know,” she said. “It is not you.”
Then the bus ran a block and a half smooth and nothing happened at all, and the two of us stood there in the middle of a hundred people and did not move a muscle, and I became aware, in the way you become aware of a thing you would rather not be aware of, that I was hard.
There was no hiding it. There was nowhere to put it. My coat was open and her back was six inches from my front and the bus had made the decision for both of us.
I felt her feel it.
I know exactly when. The light at Leavitt turned and the driver took it fast, and the crowd compressed toward the front, and she was pushed back a step and my cock came up against the shelf of her ass, and she went absolutely still. Not the stillness of a person enduring something. The other kind. The kind where a woman’s shoulders come up and then come down again and she has made a decision inside her own coat where nobody can see it.
The bus ran on. Nobody moved. A kid behind me was listening to something with the volume up, and two nurses were talking about a man on the fourth floor, and the man in the corner seat was asleep with his mouth open, and in the middle of all that my cock was pressed into the ass of a sixty-one-year-old woman with four bags of groceries, and she was not moving away.
Then she moved back.
Not the bus. Her. An inch, maybe an inch and a half, small and deliberate, and her weight came onto her heels and her back arched slightly and she settled against me like a person settling into a chair.
I did not move. I could not have moved if the driver had asked me to. The rail was under my hand and my hand had stopped working.
She did it again at the next stop. Twice, in small circles, the way you shift your weight when your feet hurt, except her feet were not the problem, and when the bus braked she let herself come back against me and stayed there, and this time the sound she made was not the sound she had made before.
It was a small breath through her nose, and it came out of her in two pieces.
I put my hand on her hip. Just the one hand, just the flat of it against the wool, not holding her, not pulling her, only there, so that she would know what she was doing and could stop if she wanted to.
She did not stop. She put her own hand on top of mine and bore down on it with the heel of her palm, and her thumb moved once across my knuckles, and her head turned so that her cheek was almost on her own shoulder and she could see me.
The face had changed completely. The annoyance was gone. What was there instead was a woman doing sums: what she looked like, what she was wearing, what the neighbours would say, what she had not had in ten years, and what was currently pressing into her.
“How old are you?” she said.
“Thirty-eight.”
“I am sixty-one.”
“I know.”
“You know,” she said, and something happened at the corner of her mouth that was not quite a smile. “You know, he says.” She turned her face forward again. Her hand was still over mine. “Twenty-five years I am in this country and I still cannot tell what a man is thinking.”
“You can tell right now.”
“Uf,” she said, which I understood by then was not an insult. “Yes. All right. Yes. I can tell.”
The bus went down Chicago past the hospital and the church and the currency exchange with the barred windows, and she stood against me with her hand over mine and her bags between her feet, and every stop that let people off and did not let anybody on made the car a little emptier and the two of us a little more visible, and I did not care and neither did she.
At the light at Noble I said, into the back of her hair, which smelled of powder and roses: “Where are you getting off?”
“Two more. Ogden.”
“I’ll carry the bags.”
Her hand tightened on mine. She did not answer for a long moment, and I watched her decide, and I could see the whole argument going across the back of her neck.
“You are not obliged,” she said.
“I know.”
“I am not a — ” she stopped, and started again in a different place. “I am a widow. Ten years. I have two sons and one of them is a police officer and the other one thinks he is my father. I go to church. I shop on Thursday because Thursday is the day it is not so busy.”
“I’ll carry the bags,” I said again.
She let out a breath and her shoulders came down, and she said, “Yes. All right. Yes.”
The doors opened at Ogden and the cold came in like somebody opening a freezer door, and she went down the steps first, sideways, and I got the two plastic bags in one hand and the canvas and the paper in the other and followed her out into the sleet.
The street was a side street going north, one-way, parked cars on both sides with the snow on them gone grey and hard. She walked in front of me with her coat pulled up at the collar and her handbag under her arm, and she walked slowly because of the knee, and she talked the whole way because, I think, if she stopped talking she would have to think about what she was doing.
Her name was Eleni. Kyria Eleni, she said, and then laughed at herself and said, no, call me Eleni, my husband is dead, nobody calls me kyria any more except the girl at the pharmacy. Her husband had been Nikos and he had died in March ten years ago, of the thing that kills men of that age, and she had been in the same bed with him for thirty-four years and in the ten since she had not been in a bed with anybody.
“You understand what I am telling you,” she said, without turning around.
“I understand.”
“Ten years. Not — ” she waved a hand with a mitten on it, ” — not that I am counting. But there was a woman at the church who tried to fix me up with a man who sells insurance and I went to the coffee and he talked about his knees for an hour and a half and I thought, this is what it is now, this is my life, insurance and knees.”
Her building was the middle floor of a brick three-flat with a wooden porch and a light over the door that was on. She got her keys out and her hands were not steady and she dropped them and I put the bags down and picked them up and gave them to her, and she looked at me over the top of them and said, “You can still go.”
“Do you want me to go?”
“No,” she said, and got the door open.
The stairs were narrow and carpeted and there were twelve of them and she went up one at a time with her hand on the rail and her hip against the wall, breathing, saying, “Is this one, and this one,” and at the top there was a door with three locks and a mezuzah from the previous tenant that nobody had ever taken down.
The flat was warm and small and absolutely clean. A plastic runner down the hall, because of the snow. A front room with a sofa that had a plastic cover under a throw, and a glass cabinet of things nobody used, and a wall of photographs: two boys in caps and gowns, a wedding from 1979 with everybody’s hair doing what hair did in 1979, a man in a suit squinting into the sun with his arm around her, and a framed icon in the corner with a red candle in front of it that was not lit.
The kitchen was at the back and it was the room she actually lived in: a table with a plastic cloth, one chair pulled out, a television on the counter tuned to the Greek channel with the sound off, a calendar from the funeral home with the days crossed off, and a smell of coffee and oregano and something baked that had been baked on Sunday.
She put the bags on the table and took off her coat and hung it on the back of a chair, and then she stood in her own kitchen with her hands at her sides and let me look at her.
She was wearing a grey wool skirt and a dark green twinset, and under it all of the machinery that women of her generation wear: a slip, and a girdle that had done its job and left marks, and support stockings rolled to the knee. Without the coat she was smaller and wider. Her shoulders sloped and her arms were soft and heavy above the elbow. Her breasts were big and low and had gone their own way inside the knit and she was not wearing a bra that was doing anything about it. There was a fold of belly over the waistband and a scar under it, old and pale. Her legs were thick and short and there was a blue vein in one calf like a river on a map, and her feet in the black lace-ups were wide and flat and had been standing on a bus for eleven minutes.
And the ass. Without the coat there was nothing at all to disguise it: a big, high, heavy shelf of an ass that pulled the wool tight and made the skirt hang wrong at the front, and when she turned to put the kettle on it moved like a separate thing that she was carrying around with her.
“Say something,” she said, with her back to me. “I am standing here like a piece of furniture.”
“You’re beautiful.”
“Uf. No.” She turned the tap on too hard and turned it off again. “I am sixty-one years old and I have a stomach like a — ” she made a gesture. “You do not have to say things.”
“I’m not saying things.”
She stood with both hands on the edge of the sink for a while.
“I do not know what I am doing,” she said, to the window. “I want you to understand that. I am not — I was not like this. With Nikos I was a wife. Thirty-four years. I knew what to do with a wife’s life.” She turned around. “And then he died in March and by June I had forgotten what his voice sounded like and by the second year I had forgotten the rest of it, and now I am sixty-one and there is a man in my kitchen with the grocery bags and I do not know what to do with my hands.”
“You don’t have to do anything with them.”
“I want to,” she said. “That is the trouble. I have been wanting to for about six years and I have been very good at not wanting to, and then tonight you get on the bus behind me and now I am standing in my kitchen and it is all — ” she laid her palm over her own heart, on top of the twinset, and her face did something complicated. “It is all awake. Everything. The whole — ” she gestured at her own body, at the ass, at the belly, at the whole of it. “At my age. Like a girl. I am ashamed.”
“Don’t be.”
“No,” she said. “All right. No.” And then, briskly, the way a woman who has run a house for forty years does things: “Are you going to kiss me, or am I going to have to say it in English?”
I kissed her.
She tasted of coffee and of the orange she had eaten on the bus, and her mouth was soft and she was nervous, and she kissed with her eyes open for the first second and then shut them and put both hands on my face and made a sound into my mouth that went straight down through me. Her body came against mine at an angle because of the height of her, her forehead on my collarbone, her hands sliding down to my chest, and then, without any warning, she took a handful of my shirt at the front and pulled me backwards out of the kitchen and down the hall.
The bedroom had a bed with a wooden headboard that had been good once, a wardrobe with a mirror on the inside of the door, a dressing table with a doily on it and a bottle of perfume and a hairbrush with her hair in it, and a photograph of the two of them on the wall, her and Nikos, at somebody’s christening, both of them laughing at something outside the frame.
She saw me see the photograph.
“He would say, good for you, Eleni,” she said. “He was that kind of man. He would say, you are forty years too young to be finished.”
“Then he was right.”
“He was right about most things,” she said, and turned the photograph face down on the dresser, carefully, not hiding it, the way you put a thing away so it does not have to watch.
Getting her out of the twinset took a while. The girdle took longer, and she fought it with both hands and her elbows out and her face going red, and then laughed and said, “Do not look at me, do not look, this is not a thing anybody should see,” and I looked, and it was the best thing I had seen all year: a sixty-one-year-old woman in a bedroom that smelled of her, wrestling her way out of her own underwear, with the sleet going on the window and the radiator knocking.
When she was naked she got onto the bed and lay on her side with one arm over her breasts and one over her belly, and she was soft everywhere and heavy in the middle and her thighs touched all the way down and her bush was grey and thinning and she had not trimmed it and did not intend to.
“Don’t cover yourself,” I said.
“I am not a girl.”
“I know. That’s the point.”
She moved her arms away. Not all the way. Her chest was going up and down and her eyes were very bright and she kept biting the inside of her lip.
She was dry.
I want to say this properly, because of all the things that happened that night this is the one I think about. I got my hand between her legs and she opened them for me and there was almost nothing there. A little, and what there was was thin. Her whole body had forgotten how, and her face when she felt me find out was the worst thing in the room: ashamed, apologetic, a sixty-one-year-old woman about to say sorry for her own body.
“It is not — ” she started. “It has been ten years. The — everything. It does not work the way it did. There is a cream, but I do not use it, because there is no reason to use it, because there is nobody.”
“Then we’ll take our time.”
“It will not work.”
“Then we’ll take our time,” I said, and she looked at me with her mouth open and then shut it and nodded once, fast, like a woman agreeing to a medical procedure.
So I took my time. Fifteen minutes, twenty. My hand flat and slow and my mouth on her neck and her collarbone and her breasts, which were big and soft and the nipples flat and pale until they were not, and her hand came up into my hair and held on. I talked to her, nonsense, the way you do, and she answered in Greek and then in English and then in Greek. I put my mouth down between her legs and she said “no” and then “oh” and then “oh, oh, God, Nikos, my Nikos” and then stopped dead and put her hand over her own mouth, horrified.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I did not mean — ”
“It’s all right.”
“It is not all right, I am a — ”
“Eleni.” I looked up at her. “It’s all right.”
And it was, and something in her let go, and about a minute later she got wet. Not a flood. A slow, real, slippery warmth that came when she stopped being frightened, and she made a sound when she felt it herself, a surprised little laugh, and said, “There. You see? It remembers.”
She was still tight enough that getting into her was a project.
I got the head of it against her and pushed and she went rigid and braced both palms against my shoulders, and her nails were short and she still left marks.
“Wait. Wait. Wait — ” her voice went up. “It is too big. My God, what is — is too big, is not possible.”
“If it is too much, tell me and I will get off you.”
“You will do no such thing,” she said, and I laughed and she laughed and then I pushed and she stopped laughing.
It went in an inch at a time and every inch of it was work. Ten years of nothing, and the muscle down there had gone back to how it had been before, and it did not want to open, and it took four tries and her breathing in through her nose and out through her mouth like a woman in labour, and on the last of them she grabbed my ass with both hands and pulled and said, “Now. Now, now, now — ” and I went in all the way and she cried out, once, loud, into my shoulder, and then held on with everything and shook.
“Are you all right?”
“Do not talk,” she said, into my chest. “Do not talk. I am — ” her voice cracked. “I am so full. I had forgotten. I had forgotten what it is like to be full.”
I stayed still inside her for a long time and let her get used to it, and that was its own kind of pleasure, because she was gripping me without meaning to. Not a squeeze. A hold. The whole length of me was held, evenly and without let-up, by a muscle that had been out of work for a decade and had come back to the job with strong opinions.
When I did move, she made a noise like she had been hit.
“Ah — oh — ” Her hand came up and hit the headboard. “Slow. Slow, slow, slow.”
I went slow. Out an inch, in an inch, and every inch of it she felt, and I could see her feel it, her mouth open and her eyes going up to the ceiling and her feet sliding on the sheet to get purchase. She was wet now, properly wet, and the sound of it was obscene in that quiet little room with the sleet on the window.
“Is different,” she said, after a while. “It is — I do not have the words in English. In Greek there is a word. It means — it means a thing that is too much and also you want more of it.”
“Say it in Greek.”
She said it in Greek, twice, and then she said, “Fuck me,” in English, flat, like she was putting a plate down, and something in me turned over.
“Say that again.”
“Fuck me,” she said. “You heard me. I have been waiting ten years, I am not going to whisper.”
So I stopped being careful.
I got her legs up and her ankles on my shoulders and I fucked her the way she had asked for, and she put her hand over her own mouth and then took it away again because she wanted to hear herself, and the headboard knocked on the wall and she said, “The neighbours, the neighbours,” and did not do one single thing to be quieter.
She came like that, with her heels in the air and her eyes wide open, staring at me, and it took her by surprise: her whole body curled up around it and her mouth made a shape with no sound in it and then the sound came, one long broken one, and her cunt clamped down on me so hard that I had to stop moving and hold still inside her and breathe through my teeth.
“Oh,” she said, when she could. “Oh. Oh, my God. Oh, I am — ” and then she started to cry, three tears, absolutely furious about them, wiping them away with the back of her hand. “Do not look at me. It is the — it has been a long time, and it is a lot, and I am sixty-one, I am allowed.”
“You’re allowed.”
“I am allowed,” she agreed, sniffing, and then she pushed at my chest. “Now get off me. I want to be on my front. I want — ” she stopped, and then said it anyway, chin up. “I want you to do it from the back. I know what I look like. I have a big — everybody has an opinion about it. I want to know what it is for.”
“You know what it’s for.”
“I want to know what it is good for. With you.”
She rolled over onto her front and got her knees under her and put her face down on her folded arms, and the whole shelf of her ass came up in the lamplight, wide and pale and heavy, with the dimples at the base of the spine and the marks on her hips from the girdle, and I put both hands on it and it was like putting your hands on the hood of a car.
“Uf,” she said, into her arms.
I got into her from behind in one movement because she was open now and wet now and there was nothing in the way, and she said, “Ah — God — yes,” and pushed back to meet me before I had finished the stroke.
That was when I understood what she had been carrying around all those years. From behind, with her weight on her knees and her back arched, she took me deeper than she had taken me all night, and every stroke landed on the shelf of her and came back at me, and she had her hands in the sheet and her forehead on the mattress and she was saying things in Greek into the bedclothes, and then she lifted her head and said, in English, clearly:
“Harder. Do not be polite with me, I am not a guest.”
I put my hand flat between her shoulder blades and held her down and gave it to her harder, and the sound of it filled the room, and she reached back and got a handful of my thigh and pulled me in.
“Is good,” she kept saying. “Is good, is good, is good.” Then: “Nobody has — ten years — nobody has — ” and then she could not talk any more, and she came again with her face in the mattress and a long groan that went up at the end into something like a laugh.
Afterwards she lay on her front, breathing, with her cheek on her arms and her hair stuck to her forehead, and said, “I need to be on top.”
“Can you?”
“My knee is bad,” she said. “I do not care about my knee.”
She got up and got me onto my back and climbed over me, and there was a moment where she sat there on her heels with her palms on my ribs and looked down at me and laughed — at herself, at the whole situation, at the two of them on that bed under the photograph she had turned face down — and then she got me in her hand and put me in herself in one slow, careful, enormous movement, and sat down on it to the root.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh, this is — ” she could not finish it.
She was magnificent up there. I want to be exact about it, because I had not expected any of it and I have thought about it since. She was not a girl doing a thing she had seen in a film. She was a heavy woman of sixty-one with a bad knee and a shelf of an ass and breasts that had fed two boys, and she rode me with her weight on her wrists and her head back, and her whole body was working: the soft weight of her coming down, the heat of her, the muscle inside her clamping and letting go, clamping and letting go, in a rhythm she had found for herself and was not going to give up.
And her face. Her face was the best part. It was not the face of a woman being looked at. She had stopped caring what she looked like somewhere around the second orgasm, and what was left was pure appetite — eyes shut, mouth open, brow furrowed, entirely honest.
“You are so big,” she said. “Do you know? You are so big inside me I can feel you in my stomach.”
“Is that good?”
“Is terrible,” she said, and rode me harder. “Is terrible. Do not stop.”
I got my hands on her ass, both of them, and it filled them, and I helped her, and she made a sound of pure relief and said, “Yes. Yes, that, hold it, hold it — ” and then she leaned forward with her hands on either side of my head and her hair hanging down and kissed me while she moved.
I was close. I had been close for a while. Older women, in my experience, are either shy about it or they know exactly what they are doing, and she knew exactly what she was doing, and the thing she was doing with the muscle in her cunt was not something a twenty-five-year-old could have done if she had studied it for a year.
“I’m going to come,” I said.
“Not yet.”
“Eleni — ”
“Not yet,” she said, and stopped moving, and sat there with me all the way inside her and her palms on my collarbones and her breath going in and out, and looked at me with her eyes half shut. “I want it to be — I want to be — ” she could not say it.
“Say it.”
“Inside,” she said. “I want it inside. Is that — can I ask that? I am sixty-one, I am not going to get — nothing is going to happen, and I want it inside, I want to feel it, I have not felt it in ten years and I want it.”
“Then take it.”
She did not need telling twice. She started to move again and this time she was not careful at all, she was grinding down on me with her knuckles white on the headboard and her jaw set and her eyes on my face, watching me come apart, and when I said it again she said, “Yes. Yes, now, now, give it to me,” and dropped down hard and stayed there.
It went through me like a door slamming. I got a fistful of her hip and one of the sheet and came inside her harder than I have come in years, five, six, seven times, with my teeth shut and a noise coming out of me that I did not recognise, and she held herself down on it and took every bit of it, and her eyes were wide open and her mouth was open and she was saying, “Oh — oh — I feel it — I feel it, I feel it, oh my God — ” in a voice that went up and up and broke.
And then she came too, on top of it, because of it, with her hand flying to her own mouth and her whole body folding forward over me, and she held on to my shoulders and shook and made a sound into my neck that was half a sob.
We stayed like that. Her full weight on me, her face in my shoulder, my cock still inside her and her not letting it go, the radiator knocking, the sleet ticking on the glass, her breathing coming down a step at a time.
“Do not move,” she said, into my neck. “Not yet. I want to keep it a minute more.”
She got up eventually and went to the bathroom on the bad knee, holding the wall, and came back with a warm cloth and cleaned me up with a motherly efficiency that was somehow the most intimate thing that had happened all night, and then she got into bed properly, under the quilt, and pulled me in after her and put her head on my chest.
“Well,” she said.
“Well.”
“I am going to be very sore tomorrow.”
“Probably.”
“Good,” she said, and slapped my chest, lightly. “Good. I want to be sore. I want to walk to the pharmacy tomorrow and be sore and not say one word about it to anybody.”
We lay there for a while. The television was still on in the kitchen with the sound off, throwing blue light down the hall.
“You should eat,” she said, and got up again, and that was that.
She put out bread and olives and the frozen thing, which turned out to be a tray of something she had made herself and frozen in portions, and she heated it and put it in front of me and stood over me until I ate it, and it was good, and she was pleased in a way that had nothing to do with sex at all. She poured wine in a glass with a gold rim. She cut an orange into quarters the way she had been cutting oranges for fifty years, and the smell of it went all through the flat.
“My sons,” she said, sitting down opposite me at last with her own glass, “would have an opinion.”
“Would they?”
“The policeman would. The other one would be happy and he would say something stupid about it and I would want to hit him.” She drank. “They think I am finished. That is the thing I cannot — they think their mother is a piece of furniture that they visit.”
“You’re not furniture.”
“No,” she said, and looked at me over the rim of the glass, and the eyeliner had run and her hair was flat on one side and her lipstick was completely gone. “No. Apparently not.”
I left at eleven. She came to the door in the quilt, wrapped up in it with her feet bare on the plastic runner, and made me take a container of the food and a bag of oranges, and would not hear anything about it.
“You are not going home with nothing in your hands,” she said. “I would not sleep.”
At the door she said, “On Saturday I will not be able to meet the eye of the woman downstairs.”
“Probably not.”
“And on Monday I will have decided it was the sensible thing to do.” She put her hand on the doorframe. “I shop on Thursday. The 66. Twenty past five, from the Jewel on Ashland.” She looked at me steadily. “I do not know if a man like you has a Thursday. But that is when I shop.”
I went down the stairs and out into the sleet, and the light over the porch was on behind me, and when I got to the corner I looked back and she was still in the doorway with the quilt around her, not waving, just watching.
On Thursday I was on Ashland at twenty past five, standing on the corner outside the Jewel with the sleet coming down, and at twenty-five past she came out with four bags and stopped dead on the sidewalk when she saw me.
“Uf,” she said. Then, after a second, holding out the two heaviest: “Well. Do not stand there. It is cold and I have leeks.”
My Bus Adventures #9: The Back Row
My Bus Adventures #8: Night Shift
My Bus Adventures #7: Beginner’s Luck
My Bus Adventures #6: Standing Room
My Bus Adventures #5: Late Pass
My Bus Adventures #4: Straight Lines
My Bus Adventures #3: The Signal
My Bus Adventures #2: Window Seat
My Bus Adventures #1: The 9:40
Related posts:
My Bus Adventures #5: Late Pass
My Bus Adventures #3: The Signal
My Bus Adventures #9: The Back Row
My Bus Adventures #8: Night Shift
My Bus Adventures #4: Straight Lines
My Bus Adventures #1: The 9:40
My Bus Adventures #2: Window Seat
My Bus Adventures #6: Standing Room
My Bus Adventures #7: Beginner’s Luck
Sleepwalking Mom – Chapter.03 – Part.06 – Twins find out. Now it’s three on one
Sleepwalking Mom – chapter.01 – part.02 – College son spies on Mom’s sleepwalking escapades.
Colleen – chapter 01 – part-03
