The Last Stop on Mill Row

Lonnie Fisher had quit on a Friday, by text, at 4:52 in the afternoon, which Maggie Lisowski considered the most honest thing he’d done in three years of driving for her. He’d found a job at the new warehouse off the highway. Twenty-six dollars an hour to drive a forklift in a building the size of an airport, air-conditioned, no children. Sorry Mags, the text said. You know how it is.

She did know how it was. That was the problem with knowing how things were. It didn’t put anybody behind the wheel of Bus 7 on the first day of school.

At 5:05 on Tuesday morning she let herself out of her kitchen door, crossed forty feet of wet grass in the dark, and unlocked the side door of the depot. The lot lights were still on. Fourteen buses sat nose-out in two rows under them, yellow gone gray in the sodium light, each with its number painted on the roof so a helicopter could find it, which no helicopter had ever needed to do. The garage smelled the way it had smelled for the thirty-seven years she’d been walking into it: diesel, rubber, the sweet chemical blue of windshield fluid, coffee that Jimmy Kostelnik had made at four-thirty and that would be undrinkable by six.

“You’re driving,” Jimmy said. He was under the hood of Bus 11 with a drop light hooked on the latch, and he didn’t come out.

“I’m driving.”

“Seven?”

“Seven.”

“Lonnie’s?”

“Lonnie’s at the warehouse.”

Jimmy said something into the engine that she chose not to hear. She poured a cup of his coffee anyway, because it was hot, and took the clipboard for Bus 7 off its hook.

Pre-trip took her eleven minutes. She did it the way she’d taught it to every driver she had hired since 1996, out loud, under her breath, in the order the state inspector liked to see it. Lights: headlights, high beams, flashers amber, flashers red, the stop arm with its own little lights, the crossing gate swinging out from the front bumper so no kid could walk where the driver couldn’t see. Tires. Lug nuts, the little orange indicators all pointing the right way. Mirrors, all seven, wiped. Emergency exits: the back door, the roof hatches, the windows marked EMERGENCY EXIT in red, each one opened and latched and buzzing when it was supposed to. Fire extinguisher, gauge in the green. First-aid kit. Body-fluid kit. The bag of kitty litter that every driver in Pennsylvania carried for the purpose every driver in Pennsylvania knew about. She walked the aisle and checked every seat for gum, knives, phones, love notes, mice.

The route sheet was clipped to the visor. She took it down to look at it under the dome light.

Kim printed in capitals, small and slanted, the handwriting of a woman who’d once wanted to be an architect and had settled for keeping a bus company alive. Route 7 had forty-one stops’ worth of names. Maggie knew most of them already: the Hartmans’ three on Bangor Street, the boy on Carnarvon who threw up on the first day every year from nerves and was fine by the second, the twins out on Tannery Road whose mother waited at the end of the lane in a bathrobe and was never once dressed.

Two-thirds of the way down, in the same small capitals, Kim had added two lines and put a star beside them in red pen.

Maggie read it twice. Then she read the address again, as if it might change into her son’s address if she gave it a chance, which was 2210 Fawn Ridge Road, a split-level with a basketball hoop and a swing set she’d helped put together on a Memorial Day when Josie was two.

Fourteen Mill Row was Leo Ferrante’s house.

She knew it the way you knew where anybody lived in Aberly, which was without trying. Brick twin halfway up the hill in the Patch, slate roof in better shape than anybody else’s, because a slater lived there. She had been inside it once, eleven years ago, for an engagement party she’d spent most of standing in the kitchen trying not to rearrange it.

She took her phone out of her jacket and called Brendan. It rang five times and went to the voicemail he had never changed since high school, his voice at seventeen saying Yo, it’s Bren, you know what to do, and she didn’t. She hung up without leaving anything. She texted Call me and then sat looking at it. Then she started the bus, because it was 6:22, and the first stop was at 6:41, and forty-one kids were about to stand at the end of driveways with brand-new backpacks whether or not her son answered his phone.

* * *

The thing about driving a school bus that nobody understood unless they’d done it was how much of it was looking. You looked at the road, and at seven mirrors, and at the kids standing at the stops before they knew you were looking at them, because that was when you found out who was going to dart and who was going to dawdle. You looked at the boy at the back who’d just gotten very quiet. You looked at the car behind you that wanted to pass on the stop arm and was going to do it if you didn’t put the red lights on early enough to shame him. You looked all the time and you said very little, and the kids thought you were a piece of the bus.

Maggie had been a piece of the bus for long enough that she could feel the town come up around her in the dark like a hand closing.

Quarry Road first, past the Pryce Slate works, where the yard lights were on and the splitting shed was already open, a man in a hooded sweatshirt sitting on an overturned bucket with a coffee, watching the sky as if it owed him money. Then down onto Bangor Street, where the row houses climbed the hill shoulder to shoulder, their slate roofs wet and dark blue in the first light, each porch the width of one rocking chair. The Hartman kids came out the door in a clump with their mother behind them yelling about a lunch. On Carnarvon a man was hosing off his sidewalk at a quarter to seven for no reason she could see except that he did it every morning and had for thirty years.

“Morning, pal,” she said, to every one of them as they came up the steps.

“Morning,” the bigger ones said, or didn’t. The small ones looked at her as if she were a building.

By the time she turned onto Penrose Street it was light enough to see the whole downtown at once, four blocks of old brick rising toward the chapel at the top of the hill. The Penrose Diner had its sign lit, the stainless car glowing pink at the edges in a way Bernie Kotch claimed was the neon and was really just the hour. Kostelnik’s Hardware had its sidewalk sale out already, wheelbarrows chained together in a line. The marquee of the Majestic, which hadn’t shown a movie since 2011, still said THANK YOU ABERLY in letters that had started to slide.

She stopped for the light at Penrose and Second. A girl of about eleven sat in the first seat behind her with her hands folded on top of her backpack like a woman in church.

“Mrs. Lisowski,” the girl said. “Are you our driver all year?”

“I’m your driver till I find somebody better.”

The girl thought about that. “What if you don’t?”

“Then you’re stuck with me.”

“Okay,” the girl said, and turned to look out the window, satisfied. Maggie watched her in the mirror a second longer than she needed to.

Mill Row turned off Carnarvon two-thirds of the way up the hill, a short steep street of brick twins that dead-ended at the fence above the Big Hole. You couldn’t see the water from the road. You could feel it, a kind of colder air that came up over the fence, and every kid in town knew it was there the way you knew where the stove was in a dark kitchen.

She came around the corner at 7:21 and saw them.

Josie first, because Josie was always first, standing at the curb in front of the left half of the twin with her hair in the two French braids that Alyssa did on school days and Brendan never could. She had on the purple leggings and the gray hoodie and the sneakers with the lights in the heels that she’d told Maggie in July she was too old for and then had worn every day of August. She had her backpack on both shoulders, which meant she was nervous, because Josie was a one-shoulder girl.

Cooper stood on the step behind her, holding on to somebody’s hand.

The somebody was Leo Ferrante.

He was in work clothes: tan canvas pants gone pale at the knees, a navy T-shirt, boots. A tall man going thin through the shoulders the way tall men did at sixty, with gray hair cut short and a face that looked like it had been left out in weather on purpose. He was holding Cooper’s hand in one of his and a backpack with a cartoon shark on it in the other. The backpack came down past Cooper’s knees.

Maggie put on the amber flashers, then the reds. The stop arm swung out with its little gasp of air. She opened the door.

Josie came up the steps fast and stopped at the top. She looked at her grandmother in the driver’s seat as if a teacher had walked into her bedroom.

“Grandma.”

“Morning, pal.”

“You’re the driver?”

“Lonnie quit.”

“Oh.” Josie stood there. Kids behind her were craning to see what the holdup was. “Mom said it’d be a new driver.”

“It is a new driver. It’s me.” Maggie made her voice ordinary. “Find a seat.”

Josie went to the first seat on the right, directly behind Maggie, the seat no kid over second grade would be caught dead in. She sat. She put her backpack on her lap. She looked out the window at the house.

On the step Leo bent down to Cooper and said something Maggie couldn’t hear. Cooper shook his head. Leo said something else. Cooper looked at the bus, at the high black steps and the open door and the big yellow side of it, and at the woman in the driver’s seat whom he had known every day of his life, and he began, very quietly, to cry.

“Coop,” Maggie said, through the door. “Come on up, buddy. It’s just me.”

Leo picked him up. That was the only way he was going to get onto the bus and they both knew it. He carried Cooper up the steps, which a parent was not supposed to do, and set him down in the aisle, and handed him the shark backpack, and stood there, his head bent a little under the bus ceiling, one hand on the grab rail.

He looked at Maggie. She looked at him. There were forty children on the bus and a pickup truck idling behind it at the stop arm, and the clock on her dash said 7:23.

“She didn’t tell you,” Leo said.

It wasn’t a question, so she didn’t answer it.

“I told her to,” he said. “Saturday. I told her to call you.”

“Seat, Coop,” Maggie said. “Next to your sister.”

Cooper climbed into the seat beside Josie and put his face against her arm. Josie, who hadn’t let him touch her on purpose since Easter, let him.

Leo didn’t move. “Maggie.”

“I’ve got a route, Leo.”

He took a breath as if he was going to say something more. Then he looked down the aisle, at the rows of faces all turned toward the front with the bright animal attention of children who’ve sensed an adult problem, and he let the breath go. He got off. He stood back on the curb by the step, with his hands in his pockets and the weather in his face, and she closed the door on him and pulled the arm in and checked all seven mirrors and drove.

At the bottom of Mill Row she looked in the inside mirror. Josie was looking at the back of her grandmother’s head with an expression Maggie had never seen on her before and recognized anyway. It was the look of a child deciding how much she was allowed to know.

* * *

Aberly Elementary sat on the creek flats below the downtown, a long low brick building from 1964 with a newer wing stuck on one end like a bad tooth. Buses unloaded on the side lot in the order they arrived, and on the first day of school the order was chaos.

Maggie pulled in fourth. She set the brake and opened the door, and the kids went past her down the steps in a wave of sneakers and backpacks and voices that went up an octave as soon as they hit the air. The aides in their yellow vests stood along the walk calling names off clipboards. A man in a polo shirt with a lanyard waved kindergartners toward a separate door with a cardboard sign taped on it that said WELCOME LITTLE SLATERS!! with a cartoon of a rock in a graduation cap.

Josie stood up. Cooper didn’t.

“Come on,” Josie said. “Coop. Come on.”

“No.”

“Coop, you have to.”

“I’m going home with Grandma.”

“You can’t go home with Grandma, she’s the bus.” Josie looked at Maggie with naked desperation. Her friends were getting off the bus behind her; one of them, a tall girl with a ponytail, was waiting at the bottom of the steps and watching.

“Go on,” Maggie said to Josie. “I’ve got him.”

“Are you sure?”

“Go.”

Josie went. At the bottom of the steps she said something to the ponytail girl and laughed too loud, and the two of them went off toward the building without looking back, and Maggie loved her for it so hard that she had to look at the dashboard for a second.

Then she unbuckled, which a driver was also not supposed to do with the engine running, and got up, and sat down on the seat beside her grandson.

“Hey, pal.”

Cooper had stopped crying. He had moved past crying into something more dangerous, which was resolve. He sat with his arms crossed and his chin down.

“I don’t like it,” he said.

“School?”

“Grandpa Leo’s.”

Maggie said nothing for a moment. Outside, a bus behind her honked, once, politely, and then not politely.

“What don’t you like about it?”

“It smells like tomatoes. And it’s loud in the walls. A lady lives in the walls.”

“That’s Mrs. Sotelo. She lives in the other half of the house.”

“She talks to the TV.”

“Lots of people talk to the TV.”

“You don’t.”

“I talk to the radio,” Maggie said, which was true. “I tell the radio it’s wrong about everything.”

Cooper considered this. He uncrossed one arm. “Is Daddy coming to Grandpa Leo’s?”

There it was. She had known it was coming and it still landed like a step that wasn’t there.

“I don’t know, pal,” she said. “I’m going to go find out. Right after I drop the bus. That’s my job today. And your job is that door with the rock on it.” She stood up and held out her hand. “Come on. I’ll walk you.”

She walked him. She left the bus running with the brake set and the door open and the aide from Bus 2 watching it, and she walked her grandson down the sidewalk in her depot jacket with LISOWSKI BUS LINES on the back in maroon letters, and she handed him to a young woman with a sunflower name tag who said, “And who is this?” in a voice that made Cooper hide behind Maggie’s legs and then, a second later, step out.

“Cooper,” he said.

“Cooper! I have your name on my door!”

He looked back at his grandmother once. Then he went in.

* * *

She drove the empty bus back up through town at 8:40 with the windows down and the radio off and said nothing to it.

At the depot she parked Bus 7 in its slot and did the post-trip, every window, every seat. Kim was at her desk behind the counter with the phone against her shoulder, typing with both hands, saying, “No, ma’am, the stop is at the corner, not at the house, ma’am, it’s been at the corner for six years.” She saw Maggie’s face and stopped typing.

Maggie went into her own office and shut the door. Then she opened it again.

“When did she call?”

Kim put her hand over the phone. “Friday. About two. She said there was an address change, she’d fill out the form. I put it on the sheet.” A small pause. “I thought you knew.”

“I didn’t.”

“I’m sorry, Mags.”

“It’s not your fault. You did your job.” She meant it, and it came out sounding like the opposite, and Kim went back to the woman who wanted the stop at her house.

Maggie drove to Fawn Ridge Road in her own truck.

It was a development from the nineties on a ridge south of town, culs-de-sac named for animals that had been bulldozed to build them. Brendan’s split-level sat at the end of Fawn Ridge with its back to a strip of woods. His truck was in the driveway, the big white Ram with the Penn-East Electric parking permit on the mirror. He was in it.

He was in the driver’s seat with the engine off, in his work clothes, the orange high-visibility shirt and the jeans and the boots, his hard hat on the dash. It was a quarter after nine on a Tuesday. He should have been on a pole in Tannery Township since seven.

She parked behind him and got out. He didn’t turn his head. She went around to the passenger side and opened the door and got in.

The truck smelled like coffee and the pine tree on the mirror and him. Not beer. She noticed herself noticing that, and noticed that she was relieved, and put both of those things away.

“Hi, Ma,” he said.

He was thirty-four. He had his father’s shoulders and her coloring, the reddish Irish hair gone darker with age, the freckles that disappeared in winter. He’d gotten heavy across the middle in the last few years in a way that made him look older and also like a boy who’d been inflated. He was looking straight ahead through the windshield at the garage door.

“I called you,” she said.

“I know.”

“Six-fifteen. Six-twenty.”

“I know, Ma.” He rubbed his face with both hands. “I was going to call you.”

“When?”

He didn’t answer.

“Brendan. When?”

“Today.” He put his hands on the steering wheel at ten and two, like a driver’s ed kid. “I was going to call you today. I didn’t know you were going to be driving the bus. Who the hell knew you’d be driving the bus.”

“Lonnie quit.”

“Lonnie.” He laughed. It wasn’t a laugh. “Course he did.”

They sat.

“Saturday,” she said.

“Saturday night.” He kept looking at the garage door. “Josie had the all-star game. The ten-U. In Halbrook. Four o’clock. I was supposed to — I said I’d be there. I was at the Hose Company. I lost track. Chaz was —” He stopped. “It doesn’t matter. I lost track. I got home at like ten-thirty and they were packed. The bags were in the hall. She’d already put the kids in the car. Leo was out front in his truck.” He said the name as if it had a bad taste. “She’d called her father. She had him waiting out front. Like I was going to — like I’d do something.”

“Did you do something?”

“No!” He turned and looked at her for the first time. His eyes were bloodshot and wet. “God, Ma. No. I didn’t do anything. I stood in the hall. She said, ‘I’m not doing this anymore.’ I said, ‘Doing what.’ She said, ‘You know what.’ And she left.” He turned back to the windshield. “And I sat down on the stairs. And I’ve been sitting there, pretty much. I called out sick yesterday. I called out sick today.”

“You’re dressed for work.”

“I got dressed. I got in the truck.” He lifted his hands off the wheel and let them fall back. “I didn’t go.”

Maggie looked at her son’s hands. He’d hurt the left one at sixteen playing football, and the ring finger had healed crooked, and his wedding band sat on it at a little angle. He was still wearing it.

There were things she could say. She had a lot of practice saying them. She’ll come back. Give her a week. Women get like this. You two have been under a lot of stress. She’d said versions of them to herself about Stan, standing at the kitchen sink, for twenty-nine years. They had the advantage of being comfortable and the disadvantage of being lies.

“Have you eaten?” she said instead.

“Ma.”

“Have you eaten anything since Saturday that didn’t come out of a bag?”

He didn’t answer, which was an answer. She got out of the truck. After a second, he did too.

The house was not a disaster, which surprised her and then didn’t. Brendan had always been neat in the way of men who’d been raised by a woman who was neat out of self-defense. The kitchen counters were clear. The dishwasher was running. In the family room the couch had a pillow and a blanket on it, folded. The kids’ things were gone from the hooks by the back door; there were only his jacket and a single pink umbrella nobody had taken.

On the fridge was the calendar Alyssa kept, the big paper one from the pharmacy with a photo of a covered bridge on top. August had her small neat handwriting in four colors. Brendan’s shifts in blue. Hers in red. The kids’ things in green. Saturday the 23rd had a green entry, ALL-STARS HALBROOK 4:00, and next to it, in red, a check mark.

Nobody had written anything after that.

Maggie got eggs out of the refrigerator. There were eggs, and butter, and half a loaf of bread, and an unopened package of the sliced turkey Cooper liked, and on the bottom shelf, in the door, two cans of Yuengling and the plastic rings from four more. She looked at them for exactly as long as it took to get the butter. Then she shut the door.

Brendan sat at the kitchen table and watched her cook, the way he’d watched her at seven and at seventeen. She made him three eggs scrambled hard, the way he liked them, and toast with too much butter, and put the plate down in front of him, and poured him a glass of milk, which he looked at as if she’d handed him a sippy cup and then drank all of.

“She’s going to file,” he said with his mouth full. “She said. She’s got a lawyer.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know. Some woman in Allentown.”

“You need one too.”

“I know I need one too, Ma.”

“Do you know who?”

“No. I don’t know anybody who does this.” He put down his fork. “I don’t know anybody who does any of this.”

Maggie took his plate when he was done, and rinsed it, and opened the dishwasher, which had finished, and started unloading it. Glasses on the left, plates on the right, the way she’d shown Alyssa once and Alyssa had changed.

“Ma. Don’t.”

She kept unloading. The silverware basket. Forks, knives, the kids’ small spoons with the cartoon handles.

“Ma. Stop. You don’t have to do that.”

“I know I don’t have to.”

“Then stop.”

She stopped. She stood with a stack of plastic cups in her hand, the colorful ones the kids drank out of, and looked at him, and he looked at her, and she saw something go across his face that she remembered seeing on Stan’s: the brief, furious shame of a man who’s been taken care of in front of himself.

She put the cups away. She dried her hands on the towel hanging from the oven door.

“Call work,” she said. “Tell them you’ll be in tomorrow. Then take a shower. Then sleep in a bed.”

“I’ll be okay, Ma.”

“I know you will. Call work.”

On the way out to her truck she called Kim.

“I want Route 7,” Maggie said.

“You’ve got Route 7.”

“I mean I’m keeping it. Morning and afternoon. Pull the ad down.”

There was a pause on the line in which she could hear Kim deciding whether to say what she was going to say. “Mags. We’re two drivers short. If you’re on Seven, who’s covering the office at seven-thirty when the calls come?”

“You are. You’ve been doing it for years. I just stood next to you.”

“Till when?”

Maggie looked back at the split-level, at her son’s truck with the hard hat still on the dash, at the strip of woods behind the house where Josie had once made a fort out of a refrigerator box and lived in it for an entire afternoon.

“Till I say,” she said.