6

It’s worth a try, calling the car-rental agency, so I do. Get a nice young man to pick me up, just as promised. He takes me back to the office, and as soon as he runs the card through, I know that I’m cooked. As I feared, they want a lot of money to take a car one-way out of state. More than is available on my abused credit card. He looks at me with a sheepish face. “Sorry, ma’am. I can give you a car for the day.”

“No. Thank you anyway.” I shoulder my duffel, jam the offended credit card into my back pocket, and walk out of there with as much dignity as I can muster.

I have no idea where I am. There is a bench outside of the rental place, and I sit on it. No sense walking off into the unknown. I should go in and ask the nice young man for directions. But to where? To what? The ride from the Crossroads Convenience Mart wasn’t long or complicated. I’ll walk back there and go back to plan B. Surely some nice trucker with Mass. plates will want a quiet rider.

“Ma’am?” The nice young man, really not so young—he’s old enough to have a day job and not be in school—is standing beside me.

“Yes?”

“The bus station is about half a mile from here. I bet you can get one to Boston.”

I am touched by his concern. “That’s a good idea.”

“I’ll take you.”

Twice in one day, I’ve been rescued by unlikely heroes. I want to find my dog, but I know that a bus to Boston is really my only hope of getting where I’m going. In all of this, I’ve forgotten that I have a destination.

I don’t let him see that I have been defeated. I shake my head against that thought. Oh no, I’m not giving up hope of catching up with Artie. This is just a better way to find him. When I get to Boston, I’ll locate Artie easily. I know I will; I’m certain I’ll remember where he was going with his cargo. Once I catch up, I know that I’ll find him. He won’t turn around and head back immediately. He said something about a relative. I try to think back on Artie’s conversations. Mostly, I had tuned them out, since they were the kind of brash manly-man nonsense so many men like to think they impress me with. But I’m sure, mixed in with the hero-in-his-own-life stories, that he’d mentioned a sister or a cousin he would see when in Boston. I’ll find him. I have to.

Artie has my dog.

“That would be nice.”

The young man spins a key ring around his forefinger like a gunslinger. “We can take this one.” He holds the passenger door open for me, a gesture that makes me feel old, or at least old enough that he sees me as requiring courtly behavior. He’s got to be around twenty-one or twenty-two, about the same age as my son. Which makes me think, as I am actually old enough to be his mother, that’s how this young man sees me.

“What’s your name?”

“Tyler. Tyler Schmidt.” This boy still has that adolescent gawk about him that will diminish as age thickens his neck and bulks up his skinny chest.

“Justine Meade.”

We don’t shake hands. “You said Schmidt?” Artie is Schmidt.

“Uh-huh.”

“I’m trying to find a guy named Schmidt. I guess it’s a common-enough name.”

“Millions of us. Some related, most not. Where’s your guy from?”

“I have no idea. I met him in Washington State, but he’s got relatives in Massachusetts, I think.” This is a silly conversation, like asking if all the Smiths in the world are related. “Arthur Schmidt.”

“Doesn’t ring a bell. Why are you looking for him? You a bounty hunter?”

I catch the look in his eye; this entry-level boy has a sense of humor. “Something like that. He’s got my dog and I want him back.”

“Isn’t dognapping against the law? Can you get him arrested?”

“I’d like to try.”

The bus station is nothing more than a convenience store. Tyler pulls up into a bus lane and hops out as if he’s my taxi driver and is going to repeat his chivalry of a few minutes ago, but I swing the door open and we end up facing each other on the cracked sidewalk. He is just the height of my son, and I resist the urge to give him a quick hug good-bye, if only for the feeling of holding a son, in my arms again, even if not my particular son. It has been a very long time since I’ve had that privilege.

“Thank you, Tyler.” I try to give him a couple of bucks.

He quickly forces the folded-up dollars back into my hand. “It’s part of the service.”

I feel the chill sweat of embarrassment dampen my shirt. This boy has me pegged. He knows I need every penny I have on me. “Do you have a card?”

Tyler fishes a company card out of his wallet, hands it to me as if he, too, believes that I might rent a car from him someday. I’m just thinking that I’ll send him a nice note he can have put in his personnel folder—service above and beyond, rescuing maidens. Then I wonder if he’ll get in trouble for being my taxi. Then I do hug him. And, strangely enough, he hugs me back.

“I hope you find your dog.”

“Me, too.”

He drives off, leaving me standing on the filthy sidewalk, thinking about my son.

*   *   *

I was so young when he was born. Not unreasonably so—plenty of girls have babies at twenty. But then choosing to raise him alone, without help, comes back to me now as the sort of reckless hubris of the very young. I named him Anthony, like his father and grandfather, but called him “Tony” from the moment he was born. Every mother thinks her baby is the most beautiful, but Tony really was: curly dark hair still wet against his tiny skull, murky dark eyes that would become chocolate brown in a few weeks. Starfish hands reaching out for me.

What girl doesn’t believe that the guy who is her first real lover is the one who will remain the love of her life? At least back then. Not like now, when girls take up partners as if they’re making sandwiches. Two bites and you’re done. Move on. Meaningless. Anthony wasn’t meaningless to me.

Every girl who worked at Marcone’s Grill had a crush on him, the youngest son of the Marcone family. I was working there, taking courses at the local community college, and definitely not interested in complicating my life—at the tender age of twenty—by falling in love. It’s probably because I didn’t pursue him that Anthony began to pay attention to me. Long talks as we closed the place up for the night, then coffee in the all-night diner that was their nearest competition. Very platonic, very sweet, and this sweet, unthreatening attention made me fall in love with him.

But, in the end, I was meaningless to him. He married me because he had to, but he never loved me. Not the way a woman wants to be loved.

*   *   *

“Anthony, I can’t do this anymore.” I face my husband of three and a half years. His face is a mask of indifference, which is how he is treating me, with indifference. He goes out every night with his friends; he rarely plays with his son. The sweet, gentle nature of our friendship has become silence and avoidance. I no longer delight in his physical beauty; I cannot see it anymore. His fastidiousness has gone from endearing to unbearable; his loyalty to his friends undermines our marriage. Our marriage, clearly, is not important to him. Maybe even abhorrent. “I can’t stay if things keep on the way they have.”

Anthony shrugs, as if his wife’s telling him she’s leaving is of no consequence. I wonder if he’s calling my bluff, but the relief in his eyes is clear. I have been the braver partner; he’s been waiting for me to pull the plug so he won’t have to. “So go.”

*   *   *

When I left his father, Tony was almost three, just young enough to think this was a normal life; just old enough to ask, every now and then, where Daddy was.

*   *   *

“When’s Daddy coming?”

“He’s not coming, baby. He lives in Brooklyn.”

“Why don’t we live in Brooklyn?”

I have no answer for that. How do you tell a little boy that his father won’t love his mother?

*   *   *

If I thought that Tony would keep me tied to one spot, I was wrong. But he did give me a different reason for moving on: I was pursuing the better life for him, one that didn’t mean living in a motel by the week or taking a shit job just because it came with some benefits. I wanted to give him a home, one he could be proud of. I always told him that the next place would be better, bigger, cleaner, safer. The next place we lived would be where he could play with kids in the neighborhood, ride his bike. Heck, own a bike. The next town or the next city, the next state, would be better. What I didn’t realize was that in order to have a stable home, there must be some permanence. It isn’t enough to have a loving mother. You need a place to call home.

*   *   *

I’m a little puzzled by the seeming lack of a bus station, until I figure out that this is a stop, not a station. The storefront has high windows, plastered with beer advertisements and lottery signs. To the left of the Budweiser ad is a smallish placard stating the place’s secondary function as a bus agency. Outside the place is a single bench, occupied by a large black man wearing an old-fashioned fedora. Inside, the place is tiny, tight, with too closely arranged displays of potato chips and lager beer. It smells like spilled beer; it smells a little like my bar. The wood floor is littered with a healthy scattering of abandoned lottery tickets.

I wait in line to buy a ticket to Boston from a cashier who may be Pakistani or Sri Lankan. On the counter, tucked between Slim Jims and condoms, is a cardboard box with bus schedules in it. I grab one and stand aside to let the line move forward. The lottery must be big tonight. The line keeps forming, filled with quiet people, fruitless dreams of a new life playing behind downturned eyes.

The next bus from Erie is at 8:40 tonight. It will take thirteen-plus hours to make it to Boston.

“One way to Boston, please.” I fish out my credit card and hand it to him.

“No credit card. Cash only.”

“You have a terminal, so why won’t you take credit cards?”

“Not for bus. Store policy.” He doesn’t even have the good grace to look sorry. “You go to Erie to use credit card.”

“I thought I was in Erie.”

This does get me a crooked smile, like the kind you’d expect from somebody who enjoys other people’s troubles because they make him feel momentarily superior. “No. You have to go to Erie.”

Suddenly, the logic of a bus ride fails me. By the time I limp into Boston, Artie will surely have turned around and headed home. I wonder if there’s a cheap flight, one of those thirty-nine-dollar specials. If I could fly, I might even beat him there.

My cashier friend offers no help, just shrugs and waits with a feigned patience for me to decide what to do. I move out of line again. The sun is setting as I sit beside the old black man on the bench outside the store. I hold my duffel on my lap and fight the urge to rest my head on it. In the fading September light, the shadows pool at my feet.

“Nice evening.” My bench companion says this quietly, as if afraid to mention it.

“Yeah. I guess so.”

“Don’t sound convinced.”

“How far is the Erie bus station?”

“You’re in Conneautville. Erie’s thirty miles away.”

“Then I guess I’m not walking there.”

“That’s why there’s buses.”

I know that I’m going to have to go back into the store, use some of my dwindling cash reserve to buy a ticket for a bus to get to a bus. I suddenly feel the lack of food and the exhaustion of defeat. I want to lie down. Mitch has failed me; he didn’t get as far as Erie. I’m in Erie County. I’ve been fooled by the same generalization that people from Boston suburbs use when they say they’re from Boston.

“Going home?”

“No. Well, my father’s home.”

“Not your home?”

“Hasn’t been for a long time.”

“But you don’t live around here.”

“No. I just found myself here. A long story.”

We sit quietly for a time, watching the gradual lengthening of those shadows. I study the bus schedule as if it’s tea leaves. I look in vain for a faster, cheaper, more convenient bus that will magically transport me to Boston.

“So, where is home?” His voice is still just above a whisper, making his question seem far more philosophical than the simple words would suggest.

And then it hits me. Why not just go back? Turn around and wait for Artie to come back to town and show up at the bar. And then I will kill him. The logic of this is breathtaking. In the next breath, I realize that the chance that Artie will show up in that bar without my dog is a chance I do not want to take. No, I’ve got to catch up with him.

I finally answer the old man. “Where my dog is.”

“I had a good dog once. Saw me through a lot of years of hard times. Never once complained.”

“They rarely do.” I shoulder my duffel and go back into the store. When I come out, the old man is gone.

*   *   *

I hunker down in the bus seat, sitting toward the rear, left side, against the window, which is streaked with the dried paths of raindrops from some past storm. I am bone-tired. My dinner of microwaved burrito is sitting uncomfortably mid-belly. I’ve smuggled a can of Coke onto the bus to wash away the metallic taste of prepackaged food. Thirty miles is far enough to catch a quick nap, and I close my eyes. But the image of my dog rests behind them and all I see is his little silver-and-white face, with the dollops of black eyebrows over those mismatched eyes. I named him Maksim after that ballroom dancer on Dancing with the Stars. I am an unabashed fan of that show, although the only ballroom dancing I ever did was in junior high when the phys ed teachers made us all learn the box step, even though disco was the rage. Everyone thinks I named him that because we dance together, but the truth is, canine freestyle came well after I’d named my puppy.

Rodney Parris gave me the puppy. He was a nice guy with an unfortunate handicap—he was married. I didn’t know that, of course. I’ve never dated married men, and have been cautious around those who claim to be “separated.” But he was married, and that was a very disappointing fact to me, because I really liked him. He was the first guy in a long time to make me glad he was around. Having discovered the wife—or rather, she discovered me—I told him good-bye. I shut the door in his face, turned my back to it, and slid to the floor. I’ve broken up too many times to forget that the pain does go away, but in that moment I was crushed. My little puppy, maybe four months old at this point, dashed over to where I sat on the floor and dropped his teddy bear in my lap. I burst into tears, me, a noncrier, and he looked at me with such worry. Sniffing back the momentary deluge, I hugged him and swore then that he was all the man I’d ever need.

And, so far, he has been.

I feel that long-ago dammed-up deluge working its way up from just above where that burrito is sitting. I bunch my fists up under my closed eyes, hoping that no one sits next to me, that no one hears me sniffle like some brokenhearted teenager. Stifling the urge to cry, I pull my phone out of my pocket.

My cell has only a tiny percent of battery left. I close the cover, praying that Artie will call me before I run out of juice. I have no idea when I’ll be able to recharge it.

By the time the bus pulls into the bus station in Erie, it’s full dark. I have a long night ahead of me.