Last Bus to Wisdom Read Free Page A

had to brave the cold linoleum to go to the toilet could slip them on. Each adorned with a prancing fancy-dancer figure made up of teeny beads like drops of snow and sky, they were beauties, and that couldn’t be said for any other of our meager stuff. Gram somehow had acquired them while she was night cook at the truck stop in Browning, the rough-and-tough reservation town, before she and I were thrown together. By rights, she deserved them. My conscience made a feeble try. “Maybe you’ll need them in the—where you’re going?”
    â€œNever you mind. They’ll have regular slippers there, like as not,” she fibbed, I could tell. “And after”—staying turned away from me, she busied herself more than necessary tucking the moccasins into the suitcase—“the nuns will see to things, I’m sure.”
    After. After she had some of her insides taken out. After I had been sent halfway across the country, to a place in Wisconsin I had never even heard of. My voice breaking, I mustered a last protest. “I don’t want to go and leave you.”
    â€œDon’t be a handful, please,” she said, something I heard from her quite often. She took off her glasses, one skinny earpiece at a time, to wipe her eyes. “I’d rather take a beating than have to send you off like this, but it can’t be helped.” She blinked as if that would make the glistening go away, and my own eyes stung from watching. “These things happen, that’s how life is. I can hear your granddad now. ‘We just have to hunch up and take it.’” Gram kept in touch with people who were no longer living. These were not ghosts to her, nor for that matter to me, simply interrupted existences. My grandfather had died long before I was born, but I heard the wise words of Pete Blegen many times as though he were standing close beside her.
    Straightening herself now as if the thought of him had put new backbone in her, she managed a trembling smile. “Nell’s bells, boy, don’t worry so.”
    I didn’t give in. “Maybe I could just go to the hospital with you and the nuns would let me live with them and—”
    â€œThat’s not how something like this is done,” she said tiredly. “Don’t you understand at all? Kitty and Dutch are the only relatives we have left, like it or not. You have to go and stay with them for the summer while I get better,” she put it to me one last time in just so many words. “You’ll do fine by yourself. You’re on your own a lot of the time around here anyway.”
    She maybe was persuading herself, but not me. “Donny,” she begged, reading my face, “it is all I can think to do.”
    â€œBut I don’t know Aunt Kitty and him,” I rushed on. “I’ve never even seen a picture. And what if they don’t recognize me at the bus station back there and we miss each other and I get lost and—”
    Gram cut me off with a look. As redheaded as a kid could be, a wicker suitcase in hand, I was not especially likely to escape notice, was I. No mercy from her on the rest of it, either. “I seem to remember,” she said flatly, “telling you not five minutes ago that I wrote down their address and phone number and tucked it in your memory book, just in case. Quit trying to borrow trouble, boy.”
    â€œYeah, well, I still don’t know them,” I muttered. “Why couldn’t they come in a car and get me, and see you and help you go to the hospital and things like that?”
    This caused her to pause. “Kitty and I didn’t always make music together, from girls on,” she finally came up with, hardly the most enlightening of explanations. “The Great Kate, you’d think her full name was back then, the stuck-up little dickens.” She sighed, sad and exasperated in the same breath. “She always did have her own