My Son Put Me On A 31-Hour Bus With A Sandwich So I Wouldn’t Be On The Family Cruise. At The Last Stop, The Driver Read The Name On My Ticket, Pulled Over, And Took Off His Cap

My son told me about the bus on a Sunday in March, at my own kitchen table in Kokomo, Indiana, with his wife beside him holding a folder.

I’d made a coffee cake. I’d also, I am embarrassed to say, bought a swimsuit. It was navy blue with a little skirt, from Kohl’s, and it was hanging on the back of my bedroom door with the tags on, because Mark had said back at Christmas that the whole family was going on a cruise out of Galveston in April. Kristen’s parents were turning it into a fortieth-anniversary trip. Eleven people, seven nights, and three islands I had looked up in the World Book.

“So, Mom,” Mark said. He turned his fork over. “Kristen and I have been talking about the ship.”

“It’s really a lot, Ardith,” Kristen said. She has a nice voice. She uses it on patients at the dental office. “It’s stairs everywhere, and all that walking at the ports, with your knee. The crowds, the heat. Honestly, it’s just too much for you.”

“The doctor says the knee is fine.”

“Mom. It’s too much for you.”

He said it to the fork. I looked at my son, who is forty-six and has his father’s ears, and I waited for him to look up.

“But here’s the good news,” Kristen said, and she opened the folder. “You’ve been saying forever you want to see Wanda.”

My sister Wanda is seventy-six and lives in Portales, New Mexico, where we both grew up. I had not, in fact, been saying that forever. I’d said it once, at Thanksgiving, the way you do.

In the folder was a printed itinerary. It started in Indianapolis and went through St. Louis, Tulsa, Oklahoma City and Amarillo, ending at Portales. Thirty-one hours, with four transfers. The ticket was a hundred and sixty-eight dollars.

“You love to read,” Mark said. “You’ll have all that time to read.”

I got up and cut the coffee cake. I gave him the corner piece, because he has always liked the corner.

Mrs. Pomeroy

I am seventy-two years old. For thirty-eight years I taught reading at an elementary school in Kokomo, mostly the children who came to me in third grade and fourth grade still guessing at words and hiding it. I had a little room off the library with a kidney-shaped table and a radiator that knocked. I figure about eleven hundred children came through that room.

If you grew up there and you were slow to read, you called me Mrs. Pomeroy, and you may still cross the aisle at Kroger to tell me so.

My husband, Don, died in 2021. He was a good man who drove a forklift at the transmission plant, and he always thought I was smarter than I was. After he died, Mark started calling every Sunday at four. He’d ask about my blood pressure and whether I’d locked the doors. A year ago January I slipped on the ice by the garage and lay there a while, and it was Mark who found me, and something changed in how he looked at me after that. He looked at me like a bill he hadn’t opened.

I took the tags off the swimsuit that night anyway, and I put it in the Goodwill bag. There’s no sense having a thing like that around.

Gate Nine

Mark drove me to the Indianapolis station at 5:30 on a Tuesday afternoon in April. It’s a low building, and it smelled of floor cleaner and old coffee. The ship sailed Saturday, but they were flying down early, and Kristen wanted time to shop for resort wear.

He carried my suitcase to Gate Nine. He had circles under his eyes, and he kept feeling for his keys. He got out a brown paper lunch sack and handed it to me.

“For the road.”

Inside was a bologna sandwich on white bread with yellow mustard, wrapped in wax paper. That’s it. No apple, not even a napkin.

I’d like you to picture that. Seventy-two years old, thirty-one hours, and a sandwich.

“Well,” I said. “Thank you.”

“You’ve got your phone charger? Wanda knows when you’re coming? You’ll call me?”

“You’ve got a boat to catch, Mark.”

He hugged me too quick, the way you’d touch a stove to see if it was on. Then he stood at the glass door with his hand up until the bus pulled out, and I didn’t wave back. I want to tell you I did. I sat in the second row with the sack on my lap and looked straight ahead, like a woman in a passport photo.

The ticket said my whole legal name, because Kristen had copied it off my driver’s license. ARDITH LUSK POMEROY. I’d never gone in for the middle name much. I folded it in my book and watched Indiana go by.

St. Louis

I ate half the sandwich outside Terre Haute. I wrapped the other half back up, because I’d taught school for thirty-eight years and I know how to ration.

We got into St. Louis a little after ten that night. The transfer was an hour and ten minutes. My knee, which the doctor says is fine, had swelled up around the kneecap like rising dough. I sat on a plastic seat bolted to five other plastic seats, with my leg up on my suitcase, across from a boy of maybe twenty with an Army duffel.

“Ma’am, you want me to get you some ice?”

“Where would you get ice?”

“I’ll find some.”

He went to the snack counter and talked a girl out of a cup of it, and he wrapped it in his own T-shirt. His name was Deshawn and he was going to Fort Sill. I asked him what he was reading, because I always ask, and he showed me the screen of his phone and said it was mostly nothing.

“Who are you going to see?” he asked me.

“My sister. My family’s on a cruise.”

“How come you’re not on the cruise?”

I’d had about two hundred and fifty miles to get an answer ready, and I’d come up with a good one.

“It’s too much for me,” I said. And there it was, coming out of my own mouth in my own voice. That boy looked at my knee and looked at my face, and he was too well brought up to say anything at all.

Tulsa, Before Daylight

I would rather not say much about Tulsa.

We got in before six in the morning, still dark. The next bus left at 8:15. The station’s bathroom had one working stall and I had to stand in line for it behind a woman having a hard night, who called me a name I’d last heard in 1981 from a fifth grader. I sat up in a chair with my purse strap wound twice around my wrist and my feet in shoes I couldn’t get back on.

My phone was at nineteen percent. I shouldn’t have looked at it.

Kristen had put up pictures of the suitcases. Five of them lined up in the front hall, and a little sign my grandkids had made, CRUISE CREW, with everybody’s name on it in glitter. Ava, Jack, Mom, Dad, Grandma Linda, Papa Steve, Uncle Rob. I read that list the way I’d read any list. I sounded it out. I went through it twice to be sure.

There were forty-one comments. Such a beautiful family!! Is this everybody??

About seven I took the other half of the sandwich out of the sack and looked at it. I wasn’t hungry. It had started to smell a little, somewhere in Missouri. I wrapped it up again. I couldn’t tell you why I kept it, except that it was the one thing anybody had given me.

I’d been a good mother. I went over it in my head, in that chair. I’d taught my boy to read at the kitchen table when he was five, with a pointer I made from a yardstick, before he ever got to school. I’d taught eleven hundred other people’s children. I sat there trying to think of the moment I had become someone you send away with a sack.

Nobody came and told me. The floor machine went by, and then it was light outside.

Oklahoma

There isn’t anything to say about Oklahoma, except that there’s a lot of it.

We got to Oklahoma City around ten and sat there until two. Then there was a long gray ride with the sun coming in on the wrong side, and a lot of wind and red dirt out past El Reno. I tried to read the book I’d brought and went over the same paragraph for sixty miles. I, a reading teacher.

Across from me a young mother had a baby who didn’t like Oklahoma either. I held him for an hour around Elk City so she could close her eyes. He got a fistful of my hair, and it was the best thing that had happened since Indiana.

Mark called once, around Shamrock, Texas. I watched his name light up, and I let it ring. That’s a small mean thing I did, and I’d do it again.

By the time we got to Amarillo, it was going on ten at night, Wednesday. I’d been on the road for nearly twenty-nine hours, if you count the sitting. I’d lost feeling in one foot and I no longer cared whether anybody knew it. I had become a kind of luggage. I’d reached the place where you stop feeling sorry for yourself because you’d need to be somebody to do that.

Amarillo

The last leg was on a little regional outfit called Llano Star Coach Lines. They ran two buses a day from Amarillo down through Hereford and Clovis to Portales, and most of the time they were half empty. Their coach was parked out at the end of the lot with its lights on and its door open, white with a turquoise stripe. A man stood at the bottom step with a clipboard and a flashlight, taking tickets.

He was sixty-some, broad and not tall, with a gray mustache and a dark blue uniform cap set dead level on his head. There was a name tag on his shirt, and it said RAY.

There were seven of us. I came last, because of the foot.

“Evening, ma’am. Watch that first step, it’s a tall one. Ticket?”

I got it out of my book and handed it to him. He put the flashlight on it the way he’d done all the others, and he started to hand it back.

Then he didn’t.

He brought it close to his face. He moved the flashlight a little. I could hear the diesel idling and somebody’s radio across the lot. He looked at that ticket longer than anyone has ever looked at a ticket.

“Everything all right?” I said. “It’s the right bus, isn’t it?”

He looked up at me then, a long look, up and down my face. I thought he might be a little unwell.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, and his voice had gone rough. “It’s the right bus. Let me help you up.”

He took my suitcase himself and put me in the first seat behind him, across from the door. He got behind the wheel. He pulled the door shut and looked in his big mirror at me, and then he looked at the road.

Mile Marker Thirty-One

He didn’t say a thing through Canyon or Umbarger. The land out there is as flat as a table and very dark at night, and you can see a grain elevator’s light for twenty minutes before you get to it. I knew that dark. I’d grown up under it. I hadn’t seen it in nine years, and it got me a little in the throat.

I noticed he kept looking at me in the mirror.

Somewhere past Hereford, in the middle of nothing at all, he put his turn signal on. I felt the coach slow down and heard the gravel start under the tires. The air brakes sighed. Somebody in the back said, “We broke down?”

“No, sir,” he said. “Give me one minute, folks. I’m sorry. I’ve waited a long time.”

He set the brake and got up out of his seat, slowly, holding on to the rail. He turned around and stood in the aisle in front of me, under that little dome light. And he reached up and took off his cap.

His hair was gray and thin and pressed flat in a ring where the cap had been. He held the cap against his chest with both hands, the way men used to do at a graveside.

“Ma’am,” he said. “Were you Miss Lusk? At the East Side School in Portales? In 1973?”

Nobody had called me that in fifty years.

I looked at him. I looked at the mustache and the broad, plain face. I had absolutely no idea who he was.

“I was,” I said.

He reached up over the driver’s seat and pulled down the sun visor. There was something held to it with a rubber band, in a plastic sandwich bag gone cloudy with age. He worked it free and held it out to me, and his hand was shaking.

I took out what was inside. It was nine sheets of mimeograph paper stapled down one side, soft as flannel, with the purple ink faded almost to gray. On the cover somebody had drawn a truck, in pencil, and it was an excellent truck, right down to the lug nuts. Under it, in my own round teacher’s printing, a nineteen-year-old girl had written four words.

The Truck Goes Home. By Ramón Baca.

“I still got it,” he said. “I told you I’d keep it.”

The Truck Goes

I ought to explain that I wasn’t a teacher in 1973.

I was nineteen. I’d run out of money after one year at Eastern New Mexico, so I took a job as a classroom aide at the East Side School to save up. I ran the mimeograph and wiped noses and supervised the lunchroom. I had no training at all, and that turned out to matter.

There was a boy in the back of Mrs. Hadley’s fifth grade named Ramón Baca. He was eleven. His father milked cows at a dairy out on the Roosevelt County line, and they’d moved four times. He couldn’t read a word, not his own name, not the. He had been passed along from grade to grade because he was big and quiet. Mrs. Hadley wasn’t a bad woman. She was tired. “That one’s simple, dear,” she told me. “Just let him draw.”

So he drew, and one afternoon I picked up what he’d left on his desk. It was a big diesel truck with the hood up, seen from the side, every hose and belt where it ought to be. Eleven years old. I took that drawing to the principal, Mr. Tolliver, and asked if I could keep the boy after school.

“To do what?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“Miss Lusk, you’re not even certified.”

“No, sir. So it won’t be any loss if I fail.”

We worked in the library with the door propped open and Mr. Ortiz mopping up and down the hall. Every day but Friday, from September until the first week of June. The letters moved on him. That’s what he told me, finally, around Halloween. He said they flipped over and swapped places. I didn’t have a name for that. Nobody in Roosevelt County did. I went and read every book they had at the college, and then I threw out the primers, because he was eleven years old and he’d been insulted enough. I asked him to tell me a story about a truck, and I wrote down what he said, and I ran it off on the mimeograph. That became our book.

The truck goes. That was the first page. It took him until nearly Thanksgiving.

In May he read me all nine pages, out loud, with his finger under the words, sweating through his shirt, while Mr. Ortiz stood out in the hall and pretended to wring his mop.

I gave him the book to keep. That June I went back to school. I got my certificate, I married an Indiana boy, and I went away. And all that time, every child I ever sat down with at a kidney-shaped table, I learned how to do it from him. I just never knew what happened to him.

“I took the written test for my commercial license in 1989,” he told me now, there on the shoulder of Highway 60, turning his cap around in his hands. “Clovis, fifty questions. Twenty-seven years old. The man offered to read it to me, because of how I looked, I guess. And I said, ‘No, sir. I’ll read it myself.’ I got forty-nine.”

Nobody on that bus was making a sound.

“Thirty-seven years, Miss Lusk. Four million miles. I retire the fifteenth of May. I’ve carried you on every one of them. I told you to every new driver they ever gave me, and they think I made you up.”

I couldn’t say anything. I had the book in one hand. In the other, I found, I still had that sack.

Channel Four

He put his cap back on, finally, and wiped his face with his sleeve and got back behind the wheel. But before he pulled out, he took the handset off the dash.

“Base, this is Fourteen.”

A woman’s voice came back through the static, tired, late-shift. “Go ahead, Ray. You late?”

“Connie, I’m going to be a little late. I’ve got Miss Lusk on my coach.”

There was a long silence. I watched the little red light on the radio.

“Say again, Fourteen.”

“Miss Lusk. Front seat. I read her ticket. I’m looking at her.”

“Ray Baca, don’t you fool with me at this hour.”

“I’m not fooling, Connie.”

I heard a sound on that radio I’d have to call a whoop. And then, one at a time, in the dark, they started coming on. There was a man with a Texas drawl, somewhere around Lubbock. “Fourteen, this is Twenty-Two. Is that THE Miss Lusk? Tell her I had to hear about her on my first day.” A woman called in from the Roswell run. “Ask her if it’s true about the lug nuts.” Somebody with a voice like a gravel truck just came on and said, “Well, I’ll be damned,”and went off again.

Behind me the old cowboy who’d asked if we’d broken down had moved up three rows without anybody inviting him.

At Clovis, where we stopped at midnight, a heavyset young woman in the same blue uniform was waiting at the curb with an Allsup’s burrito in a paper sleeve, hot, and she came up the steps and put it in my hands.

“Delia Marquez,” she said. “I failed that written test twice before Ray sat down with me. He used your method. With my own stories.”

I looked at that burrito. I’d had nothing since Terre Haute. I sat in the front seat of that bus in the middle of the night, and I bawled like a calf.

Portales

It was a quarter to one in the morning when we came down the Clovis highway into Portales. I’d told Wanda not to wait up at the station, which in Portales is a gas station with a bench.

I saw the lights first.

There were four Llano Star coaches lined up along the side of South Avenue with their running lights on and their doors standing open. There must have been forty people in that gas station lot, in blue uniforms and bathrobes and Sunday clothes, and they’d plainly gotten out of bed. A short woman with a silver braid was holding on to a little boy in pajamas. A tall woman had a phone up. And on the bench, in a lawn-chair cushion and a car coat, was my sister Wanda, looking like she’d been told there was a fire and nobody would say where.

Ray opened the door. He got down first, and he put his hand up for me.

Nobody yelled. I’d been afraid someone would yell. They just all took their hats off, those that had them, all down the line. They’d done it because they’d heard the story for thirty-seven years and that’s how the story went.

“Miss Lusk,” Ray said. “This is my wife, Lupe. This is my daughter, Elena. She teaches third grade over in Clovis. And this here is Nico.”

Nico was eight, with a buzz cut and no front teeth. He had his grandfather’s book, because his grandfather had put it in his hands. He stood on the curb under the gas station lights in his pajamas. He held it close, put his finger under the first word, and looked up at me to be sure I was listening.

“The truck goes,” he read.

It took him four minutes to read all nine pages. He only needed help with radiator.

Too Much for Me

Elena’s video got around, the way those things do. I never saw most of it. But there’s wireless on those ships, and on the third day out of Galveston, Ava saw it on her phone, sitting on a deck chair off Cozumel. I hear she walked it over to her father and stood there holding it until he’d watched it all.

He didn’t call. I’d have let it ring. He got off that ship the day it docked in Galveston, and he got in a rented Nissan and drove thirteen hours by himself, and he turned up on Wanda’s porch at seven in the morning, needing a shave.

I came out with my coffee. I didn’t ask him in.

“Mom.” He stood at the bottom of the steps, and he had those ears, and he looked so much like Don that I had to look at the mailbox. “I got laid off. In August. Nobody knows but Kristen.”

I waited.

“Her folks paid for everybody. They were one cabin short, and it was twenty-one hundred dollars. I had four hundred on the Visa. I’ve been getting dressed every morning and going to the library in Carmel. I couldn’t say it, Mom. I couldn’t sit at your table, after everything, and tell you I couldn’t come up with twenty-one hundred dollars for my own mother. So I said—” He stopped. His chin was going. “It wasn’t too much for you. It was too much for me.”

Out on the road, a feed truck went by.

“You’d have paid for it yourself if I told you,” he said.

“Of course I would have.”

“I know. That’s why.” He wiped his nose on the back of his hand, the way he did at six. “I got up at four that morning and made you that sandwich. I didn’t know what else to do. It’s what you made me, that winter Dad was out on strike. Every day. I thought you’d know that.”

I had not known that. I’d carried that sandwich for thirty-one hours and I had not read it right.

I, a reading teacher.

I stood there a good while. Then I went and held the screen door open with my foot. “Come on in here,” I said. “Wanda’s got eggs. And then you and I are going to look at your résumé, because I’d bet you a dollar there’s a mistake on the first page.”

There were two.

The Last Run

May 15th was a Friday. I’d stayed on at Wanda’s, and I had a mind to stay on a while longer. Mark came out for it. He has a job now, a smaller one, and he tells people about it.

We rode up to Amarillo in the morning and rode back down that evening on the 4:40, Ray’s last run, in the front seat. Mark sat by the window. Going through Hereford, he asked me what was in the sack on my lap, and I told him to mind his own business, and then I gave him half.

Bologna on white, yellow mustard, in wax paper. I made it myself. Ray had the other half, at the curb in Portales, after the cake and the speeches and the plaque, when they had all gone on over to the VFW and he’d gone back for his thermos.

I’d gone back with him, because of the foot. He sat on that tall first step, and I sat on the bench. The sun had gotten low across the Llano and turned the whole side of the coach the color of a peach. We ate without talking. He’d taken the book down off the visor that afternoon and given it to Nico for keeps, and the rubber band was still there, around nothing.

When he finished, he folded the wax paper into a square and got up, slowly. He reached inside and set the brake one more time, though it was already set. Then he took off his cap and looked at it, and he hung it on the corner of the big mirror.

We left it there. The engine ticked for a long time, cooling, and the cap moved a little in the wind from the open door.

Now Trending:

• My Brothers Left Me Out Of Mom’s Obituary Because I “Abandoned The Family.” At The Funeral, Eleven Women I’d Never Seen Stood Up One By One And Asked For Me By Name
• My Stepson Told The ICU I Was “Just The Girlfriend” After 27 Years So They’d Keep Me Out Of His Father’s Room. Then The Night Chaplain Opened His Old Logbook And Turned It Around
• My Nephew Took Over Our Family’s Insurance Agency And Fired Me By Text On My Birthday After 34 Years. On Monday Morning, Every Client On My List Called Him With The Same Question

Please let us know your thoughts and SHARE this story with your Friends and Family