Tillie waited on the bench at the bus stop by school. Her knees started to shiver and bump each other a bit. She pulled her jacket tighter and crossed her arms to combat the chill of the March day. In Illinois, spring took its time. Sometimes it wasn’t warm until May.
Charlie Jordan walked by her on his way home, his face buried in a book, as usual, but somehow he managed to navigate the sidewalk in a straight line. Cara Dale and Lily James followed a few minutes behind him, giggling together, Lily acting out some moment from the day.
A small brown car with a multicolored beaded rosary hanging from the rearview mirror pulled up to the curb. When the window rolled down, Tillie saw it was Ms. Martinez, on her way home from school. Ms. Martinez gave her a big smile.
“Hey there! How’s the collage going?” Ms. Martinez asked her with a friendly wink.
“Well,” Tillie said, “I miscalculated the size of the corner images, so they ended up being too large. They overwhelm the whole thing. It’s my fault. I planned the sizes of the images wrong. I need to start over.” Tillie blushed. That was a lot of information for a simple question.
“We all make mistakes,” Ms. Martinez said to Tillie from the driver’s seat through her open car window. “And not only do mistakes happen to everybody,” Ms. Martinez continued, “but mistakes can be a good thing.”
Tillie looked at her like she was out of her mind, and Ms. Martinez laughed.
“Really! A big part of being a good artist is making a mistake, and then figuring out how to use that to make the piece even better.” A couple of cars drove by, parents and kids leaving the school parking lot, but Ms. Martinez stayed right there, parked by the curbside, talking to her. “My watercolor teacher in college called it a ‘happy accident.’ So don’t worry about starting your collage all over again, just make the awkwardness of the corners do something different for the whole thing. Maybe make it a collage that celebrates awkwardness.”
Tillie sighed. She pulled her coat around herself tighter. “But I miscalculated all the shapes of the pictures,” she said. “The whole thing looks too … blah. Nothing catches the eye, like you said it should.”
Ms. Martinez smiled. One tooth in her smile jutted out slightly. “I’ll be the judge of that.”
Ms. Martinez turned her head away from Tillie and looked up and down the road. She twisted her torso to glance toward the school parking lot and then back at Tillie.
“Is someone picking you up, Tillie?” Her smile faded. Her voice softened. “It’s pretty chilly out here.”
Tillie mimicked Ms. Martinez’s looks up and down the road, as if she were expecting someone. She felt her face flush pink. Her dad’s voicemail replayed in her head: Hey, Til. I’m so sorry, but I’m overloaded at work. I know it’s not ideal, but you’re going to have to take the town bus today, okay? I’m … I’m sorry. See you in a bit. Nachos later? Or something? Okay. Bye. “I’m just waiting for the bus,” she said, moving her eyes toward her feet. Typically, she’d call her mom in this kind of situation, but she just didn’t want to hear a bunch of excuses about her dad.
“Oh, okay,” Ms. Martinez said, nodding. “But what about the school bus?”
Another car drove by, this one with some of Tillie’s classmates in it, and they waved at Ms. Martinez. She waved back, with a momentary flash of a smile, and then focused her gaze on Tillie again.
Tillie paused and then told her, “Well, my dad got held up at work and I have a doctor’s appointment. The school bus doesn’t go as near to there as the town bus. I’m not sick or anything,” she added, feeling stupid.
Ms. Martinez just nodded again. A slow, thoughtful nod. “Well, why don’t you come hitch a ride with me?”
Tillie’s head automatically shook in a “No.” “I can’t do that, Ms. Martinez,” Tillie said. “I’m fine. I’m totally okay. I do this all the time.”
As she said the words, she saw Ms. Martinez unlock her side of the door.
“Hop in.” She smiled. “Come on.”
Tillie put her hands on her shaking knees and pushed herself up. Holding her head high and her abdomen tight in an effort to make her limp appear as minimal as possible, she walked the few steps to Ms. Martinez’s car. Right as they pulled away, the bus came.
“It’s much better in here, don’t you think?” Ms. Martinez said as they headed off.
Tillie relaxed into the seat and watched the streets around them wind along. She lifted her camera to take a couple of shots of town through the window.
She felt her phone buzz in her coat pocket. Tillie eyed the text from Jake. He’d told her at lunch that he hadn’t seen the car this morning, but there’d been a couple of calls and hang-ups from the blocked number the night before.
no sign of the blue chevy after school either … we scared it off i guess
K. Talk soon, Tillie wrote back.
“Where to?” Ms. Martinez asked.
What if Tillie told her it was a hundred miles away? Could she stay in Ms. Martinez’s car the rest of the day?
“It’s downtown. Off Main Street, near the high school.”
“Oh, perfect. That’s right near my house! Mind if I turn on some music?”
Ms. Martinez began to hum along to her radio. The lyrics said something about cities and pretty girls and guitars. The singer managed to sound whiny and romantic at the same time. “Do you know this song?” Ms. Martinez asked her.
“No,” Tillie answered.
“Makes me think of New York,” Ms. Martinez said as they took a left.
“I’ve never been.”
“No? I think you’d like it. There are a million things you could photograph. On every street.”
“Really?”
“Oh, yeah.” Ms. Martinez grinned.
“So you’ve been there on trips?”
“I lived there, actually,” she said.
“Really?” Tillie asked. “Aren’t you from here, though? Someone can go from this place to New York City?”
“I went to high school here, yeah. But then I went to art school in New York.”
Tillie knew many things about Ms. Martinez because she worked on projects in Ms. Martinez’s classroom at lunchtime once a week. Sometimes Ms. Martinez would talk about herself. Tillie had learned that she wasn’t married, she loved to draw with coal pencils, she thought George Clooney was the handsomest movie star of all time, and she wrote letters to Illinois politicians requesting more funding for art programs in public schools and thought that all the students should, too. Tillie had learned, in other words, that Ms. Martinez was amazing. But Tillie hadn’t heard about New York.
“I went there to paint,” Ms. Martinez told her, keeping an eye on the road, but every now and then tilting her chin toward Tillie. “I wanted to paint, rather, but actually—somewhat randomly—one of my teachers suggested a sculpture piece I did to this art curator he knew, and they put it in an art show. So people started to think of me as a sculptor.”
“That’s awesome!”
“It was okay.” Ms. Martinez shrugged, and her eyes looked like they were far away somewhere. “I actually used to have an art stand on a small street in the city. I sold miniature sculptures there. Of women dancing. I called them my ‘little women.’”
Tillie wanted to take a picture of Ms. Martinez right then so badly. But instead she listened.
“But I wasn’t really a sculptor. Or a New Yorker, I suppose. So I came back. I really wanted to be a teacher.” She paused, and her eyes returned from far away. Her voice brightened. “And now I have my wonderful students, like you!” She moved in toward Tillie with her shoulder as if to nudge her, though they didn’t touch.
“Wow,” Tillie marveled. “If I had an art stand in New York, I would never leave.”
They whirled past Lake Avenue, and the thought of Jake and the lost father and the man in the cubicle hit Tillie.
“I think you can definitely make it to New York, if you want to,” Ms. Martinez said. “Your photographs are beautiful.”
With those words, Jake’s dad evaporated from her thoughts. Tillie must have looked shocked, because Ms. Martinez laughed and said, “Really, Tillie! Art should capture something true, you know? And your photos do that.”
It was the first time anyone had called her photography “art.”
They were on Main Street now, moments away from Dr. Kregger’s.
Ms. Martinez paused, squinting and leaning her head toward the windshield. “So what street are we looking for?” she asked. Even in such an awkward position, Tillie saw, Ms. Martinez was graceful. She had the neck of a ballerina, but a full and dimpled face. Her hair, consistently smoothed back into a sleek ponytail, was a pure black.
“It’s on Thompson Street. The corner,” Tillie told her regretfully. She didn’t want to leave the car.
“Ah, okay. Sorry, I can’t find my glasses—I lost them last week—so the letters are a little blurry. I’m wearing an old pair with my old prescription. They’re so funny-looking, right? Huge. I call them my ‘grandma glasses.’”
Maybe teachers could use the Lost and Found, too. And, like Jake had said, she really could find anything. So with a little bravery, Tillie said, “I could help you find them, maybe. If you want. Did you lose them at school?”
“I think so,” Ms. Martinez said. “I feel like I last had them there. But don’t worry about it, Tillie. Just make me a great, mistake-filled photo collage.”
She kept looking for street signs, squinting her eyes more and more, until she looked like a beautiful mole.
Tillie felt herself giggling. “Your eyesight is pretty bad, Ms. Martinez, huh?”
“Yup,” she said. “I’m a blind artist.”
“I’m sure the glasses are in pictures I took in your class. I can totally figure out where you left them. Maybe you put them down somewhere and I got a shot of it.”
Ms. Martinez made a face of disapproval but couldn’t hide a smile. “Oh, so you’re taking pictures in my class, are you? I didn’t know I was blind enough to miss that. I thought pictures were for out-of-class time.”
“Yeah.” Tillie smiled back. “Sorry…”
“Oh, hey, that’s where I live, over there.” Ms. Martinez nodded toward a little brick house with a small porch on a residential street right on the corner of Main Street and Clareview. They flew right by it, but not before Tillie lifted up her camera and in a flash took a picture of it through the car window.
“Not far from your doctor’s, I guess.” Then, laughing at herself, Ms. Martinez said, “I really need your help reading these street signs, Til.”
“We’re almost there, Ms. Martinez,” Tillie said, feeling the happiest she’d felt in a while.
Tillie looked down at the shot she’d taken of Ms. Martinez’s house. She tried to imagine Ms. Martinez sitting on the porch, maybe with a sketchbook in her hand, her hair out of the ponytail after her workday, the thick strands tucked behind her ears, waving at the kids who walked by. Maybe she had a shelf full of all her old “little women” sculptures. Tillie pictured the house at nighttime, a light on in the window, Ms. Martinez sitting on her couch watching George Clooney movies.
Thompson Street arrived and Tillie directed Ms. Martinez toward it. The sign above the tiny office, which was in an old house, read “Rehabilitation and Pain Management, Dr. Samuel Kregger, MD,” the words written in bright blue letters surrounded by bubbly stars, making the place appear more homey than it actually was. Reluctant to leave, Tillie wished she didn’t have to go to the doctor’s appointment at all. In the office, she’d hear the same thing as always—“Everything’s looking great, Tillie!”—which really meant, “You look exactly the same and things won’t change, but here’s some new medicine to help with the pain in the calf, and here’s some for the inflammation of the nerves, and because of a random car accident, you won’t be able to do a whole bunch of things ever again,” and then she’d be on her way.
As Ms. Martinez pulled up to the curb, Tillie inhaled the scent of her car. It smelled like the two short weeks in May when lilacs bloom. It must’ve been her perfume.
Tillie took a deep breath to steel herself and asked, her voice a tad shaky, “Hey, Ms. Martinez? Would you mind if I took your portrait real quick?”
“Not at all, Tillie.” As Ms. Martinez turned toward Tillie, she said, “They say a picture is worth a thousand words, right? Maybe your pictures can tell my story, huh?” Ms. Martinez smiled sweetly, her head tilted to the side. “How’s that?”
“Perfect.” Tillie beamed and took the shot. “Thanks for the ride,” she said as she opened the door.
“No problem, Tillie. See you tomorrow. You and all your excellent mistakes.”