Part 3 — Page Two
The name on page two of the letter of Virgil was printed in the same blocky bus-driver capitals he used to fill out his route sheets for thirty-one years. CRYSTAL MARIE DUNN. I felt the back of my chair shake, and when I turned around, my stepdaughter was gripping it with both hands, her face as white as the tablecloth.
“Harlan,” she whispered, “I rode his bus.” The whole lodge was quiet enough to hear the chocolate fountain. Ms. Whitlock read the paragraph beneath the name in a calm voice. “To the girl on Route 14 who lost her father in the ninth grade and rode my bus every morning with her head down. I bought her lunch when her money ran out. She read to me at the red lights. If anything happens to me, I want her to have half of this, for school or for sorrow.”
I looked at Crystal, and I remembered the winter she turned fifteen, before her mother and I ever met. Her hair was the color of straw and she did not say much at any table. Her mother told me once that a bus driver used to buy her hot chocolate. I never thought a thing about it. I was too busy with the shipyard and my own troubles. Virgil had been paying attention, the way a good driver does, to the kids nobody else was watching.
She sat down on a folding chair and cried with her hand over her mouth. “He used to say I was his best passenger,” she said. “I never knew he remembered.” I held her arm. The annuity was $186,412 split in two. $93,206 for me, and $93,206 for a girl who read to him at red lights. It was the most Virgil thing I had ever heard in my life.
Rodney had gone gray as old dishwater. “That is not fair,” he said, to nobody at all. Ms. Whitlock closed the leather folder. “Mr. Boggs, the forged claim has been referred to the Commonwealth Attorney. The check was never cashed. The bank held it, and our company canceled it Friday. The original beneficiaries will be paid in full.”
I should explain the law as it was explained to me. A claim signed with a name that is not yours is a forgery, even if the check never clears. Rodney had also kept the claim papers meant for his father and hidden page two, which is its own offense. You can silence a hearing aid, but you cannot silence the paper trail of a man who wrote everything down.
Rodney pleaded guilty in the winter to forgery and attempted fraud. The judge gave him three years of probation and ordered him to repay the $9,400 I had paid for the funeral, with interest. The vape shop on High Street closed for good. The white Corvette, which he had financed against money he never received, went back to the dealer two weeks after the wedding.
His new bride, Shawna, did not wait for a verdict. She took off her ring, set it down next to the chocolate fountain, and asked the DJ to play one more song. She danced it alone with her mother, in the middle of the floor, and then they left. I thought it was the most dignified thing anyone did all night.
Crystal came to my house the next evening and sat across from me at the kitchen table. “I told you to turn those things down,” she said. “I am so sorry, Harlan.” I laughed so hard I had to put my coffee down. “Honey, I turned them up,” I said. “That was the whole idea.” We talked until the streetlights came on, about her mother, about Virgil, and about how many people are listening to us when we think the room is empty.
With her half and mine, we did one thing together. In the spring we put a bench at the bus transfer center on Route 14, with a brass plate. VIRGIL BOGGS, DRIVER, WHO SAW EVERY PASSENGER. And we started a small scholarship for students in Portsmouth who ride the city bus to school. We call it the Best Passenger Award. Crystal reads the names aloud herself.
The VA audiologist adjusted my hearing aids in March and told me I was one of the few patients who actually used the feature on his phone. I told her I had good reason. I still wear them every day, with the app on, and I still log what I hear in the green notebook by my bed, the way I once logged watches on the USS Saratoga.
On the anniversary of my brother, Crystal and I took the flag from his casket, folded in its triangle, and set it on the bench for an hour in the sun. A bus pulled up at the stop. The driver, a young man with a thick neck, saw the flag and saluted without being asked. Crystal took my hand. We stood there until the bus pulled away.
