The Stranger at the Back of the Funeral
The Winter of the Bus Barn
They sat on a stone bench at the end of the row, under a maple that let go of a leaf every few seconds. Lyle kept his cap in his hands. He told it slowly, the way people tell things they have rehearsed in their heads for years and never once said out loud.
In the fall of 1988, his mother lost her job when the glove factory in the next county shut down its second shift. She found work waitressing nights at a truck stop out on the interstate, but it wasn’t enough to cover rent, and by Thanksgiving they had been evicted from their duplex on the east side of town. They had an old Buick with a cracked windshield and a heater that worked when it felt like it. That became home.
“She’d drive me to school in the morning and sleep in the car in the truck stop lot during the day,” Lyle said. “Then she’d work all night. She couldn’t leave me in the car alone in that lot. Truckers coming and going. She was afraid something would happen to me. So she’d drop me off somewhere in town after dark and pick me up at six.”
“Where?” Renata asked.
“Anywhere warm. The library till it closed. The laundromat till they ran me off. Then one night in early December, I was walking past the bus barn and I noticed the side door by the parts room didn’t latch all the way. The frame was warped. If you pulled hard, it popped. So I went in.”
He had slept in the back of bus 14, under the last row of seats, curled up in his coat with his backpack under his head. The barn was heated just enough to keep the engines from freezing, which was not very much. He left before five each morning and walked to the truck stop to meet his mother.
“Did she know?”
“She thought I was staying with a friend from school,” Lyle said. “I told her his mom said it was fine. She was so tired. She wanted to believe it.” He was quiet a moment. “I couldn’t tell anybody, see. My cousin got taken by the county the year before. His mom fell behind and somebody called, and he went into a foster home two towns over, and she didn’t get him back for two years. I thought if anybody found out about me, that’s what would happen. I thought they’d take me from my mom. She was all I had.”
Renata had sat with enough frightened families to know that fear. She said nothing.
“It went fine for about two weeks,” Lyle went on. “Then one morning, maybe a quarter to five, I woke up and the lights were on. Somebody was moving around in the bays. I froze. I didn’t even breathe. Footsteps came down the aisle of the bus, slow. They stopped right at the last row.”
He laughed softly at the memory, shaking his head.
“I looked up and there was this big man in coveralls with a flashlight, looking down at me. He didn’t shine it in my face. He pointed it at the floor so it lit both of us up a little. And I was waiting for him to yell. Grab me. Call the police. Something.”
“What did he do?”
“He asked me if I’d eaten.” Lyle’s voice caught on the last word. “That’s it. First thing he ever said to me. ‘Son, have you eaten anything?’ And I said no, sir. And he went to the break room and came back with half a bologna sandwich from his own lunch and a cup of coffee with so much milk and sugar in it, it was basically candy.”
“Son, have you eaten anything?”
He wiped his eyes with the heel of his hand.
“I ate it sitting on the bus steps. He sat across from me on an overturned bucket and didn’t ask me one question until I was done. Then he asked my name. And then he said something I’ve thought about every single day of my life since.”
Renata waited.
“He said, ‘Lyle, I’m going to leave this side door unlocked from now on, and I’m going to fix the latch so it works. You’re going to sleep in the break room, not on a bus. The buses get too cold. And you and me are going to keep this between us until you tell me otherwise.’”
