Chapter 010 – The Ticket To Nowhere
Chapter 10 - Chapter 010 – The Ticket To Nowhere
At four o’clock, the clerk called the Springfield bus.
I did not stand.
The ticket lay in my purse like a dare.
If I got on, I became the woman my children needed me to be: confused, relocated, grateful for whatever chair strangers pointed toward.
If I stayed, I was stranded.
The woman with the red scarf touched my sleeve.
“You got somewhere to call?”
I thought of Mr. Lawson’s number, written on the envelope in my fireproof box at home.
I thought of the letter I had signed in his office three months earlier.
I thought of the condition my children had laughed too loudly to imagine.
“Yes,” I said.
It was not entirely true.
But at seventy, I had learned something younger women rarely trust:
sometimes truth begins as a decision before it becomes a plan.
May you like
I would not get on the bus.
I would not vanish on schedule.
