He had driven the same route for eleven years.
Before that, two other routes across the same city —
different roads, different stops, different rhythms — but this one had become
his in the way that certain things become yours when you spend enough time with
them. He knew it the way you know a piece of music you have played until the
playing of it requires no thought, until your hands know it better than your
mind does. He knew which stops filled up on rainy mornings and which ones were
always quiet. He knew the light at the intersection on Pemberton that ran long
and the one on Greer that ran short. He knew where the road dipped and where it
rose and where a particular stretch of trees made the afternoon light do
something worth noticing if you happened to be looking.
He had been looking, every day, for thirty-one years.
The retirement party was at the depot — cake, a card signed
by everyone, a gift card to a garden center because someone had remembered he
grew tomatoes and had told everyone else, the cheerful and slightly generic
warmth of colleagues marking an occasion that is significant to one person and
pleasantly significant to everyone else. He shook hands and accepted the card
and ate a piece of cake and was genuinely moved by all of it in the way of a
man who does not require grand gestures and is therefore undone by ordinary
ones.
He clocked out at 4:47pm.
He stood at the time clock for a moment after the card registered, looking at the small printed slip in his hand. Thirty-one years of clocking in and out and this was the last slip, the final entry in a record that existed somewhere in the depot's system and had just closed. He folded it and put it in his breast pocket and walked back to the yard.
His bus was still there.
Route 14, the same number it had always been, the bus
assigned to him for the day sitting in its bay in the late afternoon light with
the particular solidity of a vehicle that is built to last and has lasted. He stood
beside it for a moment. The yard was busy with the end-of-shift activity of a
depot — buses coming in, drivers clocking out, the ordinary machinery of the
day winding down. Nobody was paying particular attention to him.
He got on the bus.
He did not examine the decision very closely. It was less a decision than a recognition — the understanding that something was unfinished, that clocking out was not the same as being done, that there was a difference between ending a shift and saying goodbye and he had done the first thing and not yet done the second. He started the engine. He pulled out of the bay. He drove to the beginning of the route.
The streets were busy with the early evening crowd — people
heading home, the particular density of a city in the hours between work and
dinner. He drove through it the way he always drove, with the unhurried
competence of someone for whom this road is entirely known, who does not need
to think about what comes next because what comes next has been known for
eleven years.
He called the stops.
Not over the intercom — the bus was empty, there was no one to announce to — but aloud, in the cab, in his own voice, the way he had called them every working day for eleven years. The cadence of it was automatic, the names arriving on cue the way they always had, the timing exact because the timing was part of him now. He said them to the empty bus, to the route, to the particular evening light falling across the streets he had driven through every season for longer than some of his colleagues had been in the job.
Stop by stop. The whole route.
He did not rush it. He did not skip stops because no one was
waiting. He pulled to the curb at each one and opened the doors the way he
always had and held them for the beat he always held them and then closed them
and pulled away. Some stops had people at them who looked up and registered the
empty bus with mild curiosity and looked away again. He did not explain.
He said the names.
Keaton Street. Riverside. The big stop at the market where Wednesdays were always crowded. The school stop that was quiet now, hours past the afternoon run. The hill on Alderton where the engine labored slightly and had always labored slightly and which he had reported three times and been told was within normal parameters. He knew the parameters. He knew this hill.
The last stop was on a quiet residential street at the edge
of the route where he had spent eleven years watching the same small changes
accumulate — a new fence here, a tree that had grown tall enough to shade the
stop in summer, the bench that the council had finally installed after he had
submitted the request twice. He pulled in and opened the doors.
He sat.
The evening was doing what evenings do in autumn — settling,
cooling, the light going amber and then softer than amber. The street was
quiet. A dog walked past with its owner. Someone somewhere was cooking dinner,
the smell of it reaching the open doors of an empty bus at the last stop on a
route that had been his for eleven years and was now, officially, someone
else's to learn.
He sat for longer than the stop required.
He was not thinking about anything specific, or he was
thinking about everything specific — it was difficult to separate the two in a
moment like this, which contained thirty-one years of specifics in no
particular order. The first route, the winter mornings, the passengers who had
become familiar without ever becoming known