Otis did not let me get on that bus. He folded the slip back into my hand and said, “Sir, come with me.” The insurance letter, it turned out, was about a policy Theresa kept for thirty years without telling a soul. Ninety four thousand dollars, paid to me alone, but only if I signed the claim in person in Missouri by the fifteenth. If I was not in the state, it passed to the next name on the form. The next name was my son Patrick. He had read that letter in May, and he had been waiting ever since. Then he added, “I would have put you on that bus myself, but only to bring you back.”
Otis called his cousin, who drove the 57 line, and at nine in the morning I rode Troost Avenue one more time, this time as a passenger with a reason. The driver, a woman named Dolores, would not take my fare. “Thirty one years on this route, Mr. Delahunt. You ride free.” Otis sat across from me with my suitcase on his lap. We got off at Forty Seventh Street, where a narrow brick office with a green awning had a brass sign that said Haskell and Moreno, Attorneys at Law. Troost looked brighter than I remembered, and I pressed my forehead to the cold glass like a boy.
Mr. Haskell, a gray little man in suspenders, stood up so fast his chair rolled into the wall. “Mr. Delahunt! Thank God. I have written you eleven letters.” I told him I never saw one. He nodded slowly. “Your son signed for them at the mailbox. I have the green cards.” He opened a file as thick as a phone book and said, “Your wife was a careful woman.” He poured me a glass of water from a pitcher with a chipped handle, and I drank it like a man who had crossed a desert.
A phone message slip from a Greyhound agent sent one retired bus driver back up Troost Avenue to claim what his late wife saved for him before the fifteenth.
He slid the policy across the desk, and under it a sealed envelope in the handwriting I would know anywhere. Theresa had written to me in 2019, the winter she first got sick. I read it standing up. She wrote that she had watched our son with money and did not trust him, and that if I ever needed a safe harbor, this was it. She signed it, Your Theresa, with the little heart she always drew. Otis handed me his handkerchief, a big blue one, and looked politely at the window. I have kept it in my breast pocket ever since.
Then Mr. Haskell turned the page. “There is one more matter. When you signed the house over to Patrick, your wife had me record a life estate. It is on file at the county. Legally, Francis, you may live in that house until you pass, and he cannot sell it, rent it or move you out of it. The bank clerk never told you, and I suspect your son never read the fine print.” I felt my knees go soft. Otis pulled out a chair.
We signed the claim at ten forty. Mr. Haskell stamped it, copied it three times and had his secretary walk it to the insurance office herself. Then he picked up the phone and called a deputy sheriff he knew from church. “We are going to have a quiet talk with a young man in Waldo,” he said. I asked him to go easy on the boys, my grandsons. They had not done anything but play video games in my chair. Mr. Haskell promised he would. Otis offered to wait in the hall, but I asked him to stay. A man should have a friend beside him when his life turns over on its hinge.
Patrick opened the door of my house in his socks, holding a cereal bowl. He saw me, then Otis, then the deputy and Mr. Haskell, and the bowl went down on the porch rail very carefully. Gina came up behind him and her face did a hard little thing, like a window shade snapping shut. Mr. Haskell read the life estate paragraph out loud. Nobody interrupted. When he got to the part about the unsent letters, Patrick finally said, “Dad, I can explain.” I said, “Son, I rode the bus. I have time.” Somewhere in the house, a television shouted about a game.
They had thirty days to find another place, and Mr. Haskell wrote it up so there could be no argument. The younger boy, Danny, hugged me before they left and cried into my shirt. He sends me a postcard every week now. The older one carried my things back into the master bedroom without being asked. Loretta called that night from Amarillo, and I told her everything, and she said, “Frankie, I told that Otis to sit on you if he had to.” We laughed until I coughed.
Mr. Haskell then showed me something else that made me sit down again. Patrick had phoned his office twice in the spring, pretending to be me, asking when the policy would pay and whether a signature could be done by mail. The secretary had noted both calls and the number he used. It was the landline of my own house. I thought about all the evenings he sat at my table eating my pot roast and asking whether I was comfortable. Otis, bless him, said nothing, only bought me a coffee in a paper cup from the machine in the hall.
On Saturday I put on my good shoes and Theresa and I went for a ride. I sat in my old seat, the sideways one behind the driver, with her picture in my shirt pocket. Dolores kept the bus at a gentle speed down Troost. At every corner someone on the sidewalk, a mailman, two kids, a man with a cane, lifted a hand to the window. I waved back to every one of them. Some benches you never forget, and some drivers still wave. Theresa would have approved of the whole day, and the sandwiches too, which I had finally eaten on the bus.
