The Stranger at the Back of the Funeral
The Man Who Kept Odd Hours
Orrin Pruett had worked as a mechanic at the Tri-County school bus garage from 1971 until his retirement in 2008, and for most of Renata’s childhood the garage had been less a workplace than a rival. Everyone in Marlow Bend called it the bus barn. It sat at the edge of town behind a chain-link fence, a long corrugated steel building with six bays, a parts room, a break room with a coffee maker older than Renata, and a gravel yard where forty yellow buses slept in rows like cattle.
Her father went there before dawn to warm up the fleet in winter, and he came home at four-thirty smelling of diesel and cold air. That part she had understood. Every family on Locust Street had a father who left early and came home tired. What she had never understood was the nights.
It started the winter she turned fifteen. After supper, after the dishes, after the evening news, her father would stand up from his recliner, take his coat off the hook by the back door, and say, “Going out to the barn for a bit.” Her mother would hand him a lunch pail she had packed earlier: a sandwich, a thermos of soup, sometimes a slab of pie wrapped in wax paper. And he would go. He came back after midnight, sometimes later. Renata knew because her bedroom sat over the driveway, and she would lie awake listening for the crunch of his tires on the gravel.
“What does he do out there?” she had asked her mother once.
Joyce Pruett had been drying a pot at the sink. She dried it for a long time before she answered. “Your father says the buses need him.”
It was not an answer, and even at fifteen Renata had heard what lived underneath it. Her mother stopped humming in the kitchen that winter. She stopped waiting up. Some nights Renata heard her crying behind the bathroom door with the faucet running, as if water could cover the sound. When Renata asked her father directly, at the dinner table, why he had to go out every single night, he set down his fork, looked at her with those flat gray eyes, and said, “Some work doesn’t keep regular hours.” Then he picked his fork back up, and that was the end of it.
“Some work doesn’t keep regular hours.”
By spring the night trips had stopped as suddenly as they began. But something in the house had cracked and never quite set right again. Renata decided, with the certainty only a teenager can manage, that her father loved engines more than he loved any of them, and she built the rest of her life on that foundation. She left for nursing school in Columbus at eighteen and rarely came back. She called once a month, on Sundays, and their conversations ran about six minutes. Weather. His knee. Curtis’s boys. Goodbye.
When the cancer came, it was Renata who took leave from the hospice where she had worked for twenty-two years and moved back into her childhood bedroom to care for him. She told herself it was professional duty, that she knew how to do this and Curtis did not. That was true. It was also true that some stubborn part of her was still waiting for him to explain himself.
He never did. He grew quieter, then thinner, then mostly asleep. But on his second-to-last night, deep in the haze of the morphine, he gripped her wrist with surprising strength and pulled her close.
“The side door,” he whispered. “Did you leave it unlocked? Make sure it’s unlocked. It’s cold out.”
She had patted his hand and told him yes, Dad, it’s unlocked, the way she had told a hundred confused patients a hundred gentle things that weren’t quite true. She had assumed he was dreaming about the house.
Now, standing in the rain beside the hearse, holding the memory of a few words in a guest book, she was no longer sure he had been talking about the house at all.
