Chapter 6

Eight days later the board read 21.

Kit took the letter with her to the transit center between her dispatch shifts, and because she carried it, the window room let me follow.

I had spent years in that seating area, with the orange benches and the timetable board.

Bernice was there before her shift, wearing the yellow rain jacket she never trusted the sky without.

Her canvas bag sat on the bench beside her, with the strap I'd sewn for her when the buckle broke.

A bus sighed up to the curb, opened its doors on nobody, and pulled away.

Kit sat down but left a full seat between them.

"You're Bernice?"

"I am." Bernice turned the bag over in her lap. "You'd be Kit. You have your mother's way of turning up alone when you're not sure you want to be seen."

Kit pulled the letter from her back pocket.

"You know what this says?"

"I know what she told me." Bernice didn't take it. "She paid my fare that afternoon, and she was short for her own. I got on the bus. She didn't."

"So it paid for something."

"It got me to a meeting about my son's speech classes." Bernice looked at Kit. "That's what it bought. Your mother missing her bus was what it cost her, and she chose that. It doesn't have to mean more than that."

"How much was it?"

"A little under two dollars."

Kit let out a short breath that wasn't a laugh.

I had carried that number for twenty-nine years like a stone in my shoe.

Kit's hands went flat on the letter.

"Did it fix something? For him, or for you?"

"My son's fine. He'd have been fine either way." Bernice said it plainly. "I could tell you it changed my life. It would make this easier for you, and it would be a lie."

"I keep waiting for the part where it's worth it."

"Maybe there isn't one."

"Then why tell me?"

Bernice shifted on the bench.

"Because you're the one who has to carry what happened, and you've been carrying it without the story."

Kit looked away.

"I don't need the story," she said. "I needed her at the solo."

"Then that's true." Bernice didn't try to fill the pause. "She knew it too."

I wanted to hear Kit say she understood.

I wanted to be on that bench in some small way, smoothing things over like I used to.

But I was behind the window in the viewing room, and I was the thing that couldn't be smoothed.

Kit's eyes drifted to the corner by the vending machines, where a square of blue tape marked a spot on the floor.

"What's that for?"

"Thursdays," Bernice said. "I run a fare-help table there. Riders who come up short, riders who need a route home. Your mother helped me for six years."

"She told me she helped people make change."

"She did." Bernice almost smiled. "She brought that scuffed folding table of hers, the one with the glue on the hinge, and she showed me how to fold the slips. Thirds, with a thumbnail crease, so riders could keep them in a wallet."

"Thirds." Kit ran her own thumbnail along the fold in the letter. "She did that with my permission slips."

"That isn't me asking you to pick any of it up," Bernice said. "I'm telling you where she was on Thursdays. And I'm not here to make her a saint. She lied to you, and I told her so more than once."

Kit's office was a hundred yards from that bench.

For six years I had made sure my Thursdays ran while she was on the radio.

"Do you know why she didn't just tell me?" Kit asked.

Bernice picked a thread off the strap.

"She told me once," she said, "she was more afraid of confessing than of being hated."