A Bus Driver Ordered Me And My Old Dachshund Off The Bus In The Sleet Because “Nobody Wants To Smell Your Dog.” Then The Woman In The Front Seat Pulled Down Her Scarf And Said His Full Name

Every Thursday for the last two years, I have taken the number 14 bus across Erie to see my late wife’s sister, Carmela. I leave my house on West 26th Street at 9:40 in the morning. I walk two blocks to the shelter by the pharmacy. The bus comes at 9:52 if the bridge isn’t backed up. I ride it for thirty-one minutes, past the hospital and the old GE plant and the Catholic school where Teresa and I were married in 1977, and I get off on Buffalo Road in front of a bakery that has been closed since the pandemic. Carmela’s apartment is on the second floor across the street.

I bring Frankie.

Frankie is a black-and-tan dachshund, thirteen years old, with a gray chin and a belly that brushes the carpet. He was Teresa’s dog. I want to be clear about that. I was never a small-dog man. I grew up with a German shepherd named Brutus and I always figured a dog should be big enough to knock you over. But Teresa saw Frankie in the window of a pet store on Peninsula Drive in 2013, the last puppy in the pen, and she stood there with her hand on the glass until I gave up and went inside and got my checkbook out.

Teresa died two years ago this March. She went to sleep on a Sunday afternoon on the couch with Frankie on her lap and did not wake up. The doctors said it was a stroke. They said she did not feel anything. Frankie stayed on that couch for most of a week.

Carmela is eighty-one. She is Teresa’s older sister, and she never married, and she has lived in that apartment on Buffalo Road since 1979. Her eyes aren’t good anymore and she doesn’t drive. She doesn’t like the telephone. But on Thursdays I sit in her kitchen and we drink coffee out of the same chipped cups Teresa’s mother owned, and Frankie climbs up on Carmela’s lap, and she puts her face down in the fur on his neck and breathes in.

“He still smells like her house,” she told me the first time. “Don’t you ever stop bringing him.”

So I haven’t.

The Rules About Carriers

I am seventy-one years old and I am a rule-follower. I worked thirty-four years as a machinist and I believe in reading the instructions. Before I ever brought Frankie on a bus, I went down to the transit authority office on State Street and asked a woman behind the counter what the rules were about dogs.

She gave me a pamphlet. Small pets were permitted on all routes, it said, provided they were in a closed carrier that could fit on the passenger’s lap and did not block the aisle. The pet could not occupy a seat. The carrier had to stay closed.

I bought a soft gray carrier with mesh sides and a zipper across the top. It cost me forty-four dollars at the pet store. Frankie hated it for about two weeks and then decided it was his little apartment. On Thursdays I put a towel in the bottom of it, one of Teresa’s old dish towels, and he walks in by himself and turns around three times and lies down. I zip it most of the way, leaving just enough room at the front for him to put his nose out, because he likes to smell the bus. It is a lot of smells for a dachshund.

In two years, nobody on the number 14 said a word about it. The regular driver, a heavyset woman named Bettany who wears her hair in a bun, used to say, “Morning, Leon, morning, Frankie,” every Thursday. Some of the regular riders knew him too. There was a nurse who rode to the hospital on Thursdays and always reached over to let Frankie sniff her fingers. There was a boy from the Catholic high school who called him “the hot dog” and pretended to be annoyed when Frankie licked his hand.

Then, the week before Thanksgiving, Bettany retired.

A New Driver on the 14

The Thursday after Bettany’s last day, it was sleeting. Not snow. Sleet, the kind that comes sideways off the lake and gets into your collar and down your neck and turns the sidewalks into a skating rink. I almost didn’t go. But Carmela had called the night before, which she never does, and said she’d made the anise cookies Teresa liked, so I put on my navy peacoat and my gray scarf and my good rubber-soled shoes, and I zipped Frankie into his carrier, and I went.

The bus was four minutes late. When it pulled up to the shelter and the door folded open, there was a new man behind the wheel. He was maybe forty-five. Shaved head. A thick neck and a face that looked like it had been in a bad mood since high school. His name badge said T. KEMP.

I said good morning. He didn’t say anything. I tapped my card and started back toward my usual seat, the sideways one behind the driver, where I can put the carrier on my lap without blocking anything.

“Hey,” he said. “What’s in the bag?”

“My dog,” I said. “He’s in a carrier.”

“Not on my bus.”

I stopped in the aisle. “Sir, the rules say small pets are allowed in a closed carrier.”

He looked at me in the big mirror over the windshield. “I don’t care what the rules say. Nobody wants to smell your dog at nine in the morning. Take it off.”

There were maybe fifteen people on the bus. I felt all of them looking. The nurse was there, in her scrubs, in a seat halfway back. The boy from the high school was there with his earbuds in. There were people I didn’t know, too, bundled up in their coats, wet from the sleet, just wanting to get where they were going.

I said, “I’ve been riding this bus with him every Thursday for two years.”

“Then you’ve been doing it wrong for two years,” he said.

The Doors Opened on the Sleet

I sat down. I don’t know why. I suppose I thought if I sat down and kept quiet he would let it go. I put the carrier on my lap and put my hand on top of it, and through the mesh I could feel Frankie’s warm side going up and down.

The driver didn’t pull out. He sat there with the bus idling at the shelter and the wipers going back and forth on the windshield and the sleet ticking on the roof. Behind us, a car honked.

“I’m not moving,” he said, “until that dog is off this bus.”

The nurse said, “Oh, come on.” A man in a Steelers hat near the back said, “Just drive, man.” The driver didn’t look at either of them.

Then he got up.

He stepped out from behind the wheel into the aisle, right in front of me. He was a big man, bigger than he’d looked sitting down, and he leaned over me and pointed at the open door. Outside, the sleet was coming down so hard you could barely see the pharmacy sign across the street.

“Off,” he said. “Now. I’ll call a supervisor if I have to. You and your dog can wait for the next one.”

The next one would come in forty minutes. In the sleet. On a sidewalk like a skating rink. At my age.

I want you to understand that I am not a coward. I was in the Army. I’ve stood up to foremen and union reps and a man who tried to rob my car at a gas station in 1991. But there is something that happens when you get old. People stop seeing you as a man. They start seeing you as a problem to be moved. And after enough years of that, a part of you starts to believe them.

I stood up. I held Frankie’s carrier against my chest with both arms. I could feel him shifting inside, confused, his nose pushing at the gap in the zipper. I started toward the door.

That was when the woman in the front seat spoke.

“Travis Dean Kemp”

She had been sitting in the first forward-facing seat on the right side, the one right behind the front door. I had not noticed her when I got on. She was a small woman in a long purple coat with a knit hat pulled down to her eyebrows and a thick wool scarf wound up over her nose and mouth, so that all you could see were her eyes. She had a big canvas bag on her lap with the top of a silver thermos sticking out of it.

She pulled the scarf down off her face. She was maybe in her late sixties. A lined face, a pointed chin, and the same gray eyes as the man standing in the aisle.

“Travis Dean Kemp,” she said.

She did not say it loudly. She said it the way only one kind of person in the world says a grown man’s whole name.

The driver turned around so fast I thought he would fall over. All the color went out of his face.

“Ma?”

“Close that door,” she said.

He didn’t move. He just stared at her.

“Ma, what are you doing here?”

“I got on at the depot at seven-fifteen,” she said. “I’ve been riding this bus for two hours and twenty minutes. You’ve gone right past me four times. It’s your first week on a new route and I brought you soup. Close that door, Travis.”

He closed the door.

The bus went very quiet. Even the man in the Steelers hat didn’t say anything. I was still standing in the aisle with Frankie’s carrier against my chest, and I did not know if I should sit down or keep going, so I stood there like a fool.

The woman looked at me. “Sir,” she said. “Please sit down. You’ll fall.”

I sat down.

Then she looked back at her son.

“You remember Mr. Szymanski,” she said.

The Man Downstairs

I would not have known anything about any of this if she hadn’t told it right there in the aisle of the number 14, with fifteen strangers listening and the sleet on the windows. I think she meant for all of us to hear it. I think that was the point.

When Travis was nine years old, she said, his father left. Just packed a bag one Saturday and drove off to Ohio and didn’t come back. They lived on the third floor of a walk-up on East 10th Street. Travis stopped talking. He stopped eating. He stopped going outside. He would lie on his bed after school and stare at the ceiling, and nothing she did could get him up.

Downstairs on the first floor lived an old man named Mr. Szymanski. He was a widower, a retired railroad man, and he had a little red dachshund named Biscotti.

“Every afternoon,” she said, “Mr. Szymanski knocked on our door at four o’clock and asked if you could help him walk Biscotti, because his knees were bad. Every single day for a year. You got out of that bed for that dog. You talked to that dog. You told that dog things you didn’t tell me. Mr. Szymanski didn’t need help with any dog. He had better knees than I did. He just saw a boy who needed somewhere to go at four o’clock.”

The driver’s face had gone from white to red. He stood there with his big hands hanging at his sides and his mouth open.

“When Mr. Szymanski moved to his daughter’s in Pittsburgh,” she said, “he left you Biscotti’s leash. You kept it in your sock drawer until you were twenty-five years old. I know because I put away your laundry.”

She turned in her seat and looked at Frankie’s nose poking out of the gray carrier on my lap. Then she looked back at her son.

“Nobody wants to smell your dog?” she said. “Is that what I heard you tell this man?”

Thirty-One Minutes

He apologized. I’ll give him credit for that. He didn’t do it well, but he did it. He looked at the floor of the bus and said, “Sir, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.” Then he looked at his mother and said, “Can I please drive now?” and she said, “You may,” and he went back to his seat and pulled out into traffic, eleven minutes late.

His mother moved back two rows to sit across from me. She told me her name was Winona. She asked me the dog’s name and I told her. She asked me whose dog he was, and I told her that too, all of it, about Teresa and the pet store window and the couch and Carmela and the anise cookies. I don’t know why I told a stranger all that. Maybe because she had just told fifteen strangers about her son.

She put her finger through the mesh of the carrier, and Frankie licked it.

“He’s lovely,” she said. “He looks like Biscotti, except Biscotti was red. Same belly.”

The nurse, a few seats back, was wiping her eyes. The boy from the high school had taken his earbuds out. The man in the Steelers hat said to no one in particular, “Best bus ride I ever been on.”

I rode the whole thirty-one minutes with Winona Kemp beside me. At every stop, I watched Travis in the big mirror over the windshield, and every few stops I saw him look back, not at his mother, but at the carrier on my lap. I could not read his face. I am not sure he could have read it himself.

When we got to Buffalo Road, I stood up to get off. Travis opened the door. Then, without a word, he got up out of his seat again, and for half a second I thought here we go. But he stepped down onto the sidewalk ahead of me, into the sleet, and held out his arm so I could hold onto it going down the steps.

“Watch it,” he said gruffly. “It’s slick.”

I held onto his arm. He walked me all the way to the curb in front of the closed bakery. Then he went back up the steps and the door folded shut and the number 14 pulled away with Winona Kemp waving at me through the fogged-up window, and Frankie and I stood there in the sleet in front of Carmela’s building.

The Anise Cookies

I told Carmela the whole thing at her kitchen table while Frankie lay in her lap with his nose in her sleeve. She laughed so hard she had to take her glasses off.

“His mother,” she said. “On the bus. With soup.”

“With soup,” I said.

“Teresa would have loved that,” she said, and then she stopped laughing, and we sat there for a while without talking, the way you do. The anise cookies were good. They weren’t as good as Teresa’s. Nobody’s are. But I ate four of them, and I put two in my pocket for later.

When I got back to the stop on Buffalo Road at one o’clock to go home, the sleet had stopped. The bus that came was the number 14. Travis Kemp was driving it.

He opened the door. He looked at me. He looked at the carrier.

“Morning,” he said. Then, after a second, “Afternoon. Whatever.” And then, as if it cost him something to say it, “Hey, Frankie.”

What Was on the Seat

The next Thursday, I got to the shelter by the pharmacy at 9:45. The bus came at 9:52 exactly. Travis was driving. The door folded open, and before I could even tap my card he said, “Morning, Leon,” like he’d been saying it for years.

The sideways seat behind the driver had a folded towel on it. A clean blue bath towel. Sitting on top of the towel was a small paper bag.

“What’s this?” I said.

“For the dog,” he said. He didn’t look at me. He looked at the road. “So the carrier doesn’t slide around. And there’s some of those chicken jerky things in the bag. My mother said to ask if he can have them. I didn’t know if he’s got teeth.”

“He’s got some teeth,” I said.

“Okay,” he said. “Good.”

I sat down and put Frankie’s carrier on the towel. It didn’t slide around. I opened the bag and gave Frankie one piece of chicken jerky through the gap in the zipper, and he ate it like he hadn’t eaten in a month, which is how he eats everything.

We drove for a while without talking. Past the hospital and the old GE plant. Past the Catholic school. At the light on Parade Street, Travis looked at me in the mirror and said, “She told you about the leash?”

“She did.”

He was quiet for a block. Then he said, “It’s in my truck. In the glove box. I still have it.”

I didn’t say anything to that. I didn’t think he wanted me to.

Every Thursday Since

That was a year ago this week. I still ride the number 14 every Thursday. Travis still drives it. Frankie still rides in the gray carrier on a clean blue towel, which Travis replaces every Monday, I have been told, from a stack he keeps in his locker at the depot. The nurse still lets Frankie smell her fingers. The boy from the high school graduated in June and stopped riding, but before he did, he made Frankie a little paper bus pass and laminated it at school. It is clipped to the side of the carrier. It says FRANKIE, RIDER, ROUTE 14.

Winona rides with us sometimes. She brings soup in the silver thermos, enough for three. Carmela has met her. The two of them sit together at Carmela’s kitchen table on the Thursdays Winona comes along, and they talk about their sons and their sisters and their dead and their bad knees, and Frankie goes back and forth between their laps like a little black-and-tan diplomat.

Frankie is fourteen now. He is slower getting into the carrier. He sleeps most of the ride. Some Thursdays I worry about how many more of these we have. But every week, when the bus door folds open at the shelter by the pharmacy and that big gruff man behind the wheel says, “Morning, Leon, morning, Frankie,” I think about a little boy on the third floor of a walk-up on East 10th Street, getting out of bed at four o’clock in the afternoon because an old man downstairs knocked on his door.

I don’t know if anybody ever told Mr. Szymanski what he did. I hope somebody did.

If you’ve ever been the old person somebody tried to move out of the way, or the one who stood up and said a grown man’s whole name, maybe pass this along to someone who rides the bus. You never know who’s sitting in the front seat with a thermos of soup, waiting for the right moment to pull down her scarf.

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