wait until you’re called,” Mrs. Parks snaps at the woman behind me as she prints out a ticket and hands it to me. “Don’t lose this.”
I turn, and the woman isn’t a woman at all, but a girl really, pink skin dotted with freckles, a thick froth of red hair, eyes that likely haven’t seen much of the world.
“Sorry,” she says and moves to a row of chairs against the wall as Mrs. Flowers scans my card, checks my face against the photo on her computer screen, and puts a red tick next to my name.
“You,” Mrs. Parks says, pointing her chin at the young woman. I take a step backward, because it seems that chin is about to poke me in the eye. She aims it toward me next. “Go. Sit.”
“You forgot ‘Stay,’” I tell her.
“Stay.” The eyes peeking out from above her horn-rimmed glasses show no sign of getting the joke. “You,” she says again.
I roll my suitcase to an empty chair at the same time the girl-woman stands. “Ruby Jo Pruitt,” she tells Mrs. Flowers when she reaches the desk. “Good morning.”
“Identification.”
Ruby Jo fishes her yellow card from a tired leather hobo bag slung over one shoulder. And she promptly drops it. “Sorry.”
“Pick it up, girl. I don’t have all day.”
“You don’t gotta be so mean, you know,” Ruby Jo says, bending to pick up the card. Those eyes that haven’t seen much are shining. “Here.”
Mrs. Flowers scans, looks, and ticks. Mrs. Parks prints another ticket, reminding Ruby Jo not to lose it. “Take your seat. Next.”
In the past five minutes, more people have come into the room, mostly women, a few men, an entire spectrum of colors and ages and body types. The only free seat is the plastic chair, a relic from an old high school cafeteria, to my right. Ruby Jo takes it, setting her duffel bag between her feet. Her shoe brushes mine.
“Sorry,” she says, rearranging herself, trying to make her body smaller than it already is.
“Don’t worry about it. At least you didn’t scuff one of their shoes,” I say, nodding in the direction of Mrs. Flowers and Mrs. Parks.
“Yeah. Prolly woulda crushed me like a june bug if I had. How you like them two, huh?”
Ruby Jo’s got one of those voices that most people can place on a map. It’s tinged with the hues of Appalachia, probably southwestern Virginia or West Virginia, the kind of dialect that screams poor, uneducated trailer trash. Looking at Ruby Jo’s dress and shoes, I might be on the right track about poor, but I’ll leave the trailer trash judgment to people like my husband.
The slip of paper Mrs. Parks gave me is nothing more or less than a ticket. On the left is my origin and destination, printed in black. On the right side, there’s a barcode. The time at the bottom states an 11:00 AM departure. If we drove straight through, we’d cross the Missouri-Kansas border in about seventeen hours.
Seventeen hours on a bus. Shit.
“Where you headed, ma’am?” Ruby Jo’s eyes, the ones that haven’t seen much of this world, move toward my ticket.
“Kansas,” I say, holding the slip of paper up. I’ve got nothing to hide.
“Me too. Never seen Kansas. Never seen a place that’s all flat like that. Never seen the ocean, either, come to think of it.”
Like I said, eyes that haven’t seen much.
I put Ruby Jo in her early twenties, too young to have her doctorate, so, unlike me, she must be coming from a teaching gig at a green school. She also must be either out of her mind or have some unflappable call to the teaching profession to have gotten into the education game so recently. Looking her over, my best guess is the unflappable call, but there’s another possibility.
Not many younger men and women pick teaching these days, not voluntarily, not like they did when Anne was starting school. There’s too much goddamned pressure now. It got to a point about ten years ago where the education departments at most universities saw enrollment rates