Birmingham, Alabama, was hot.
Not hot like the Ohio summers I grew up in, where the air was kind of dry and a cool glass of water was enough to make you feel refreshed. Birmingham had that stick-to-your-clothes, wipe-your-forehead-twice, oppressive kind of heat that just sat on your shoulders like some fat old, sweaty dog. The air conditioner on the Greyhound was actually working, so the heat hit me like a sucker punch the second I stepped off the bus. The ride from Columbus to Birmingham was seventeen hours, five of which I had spent sleeping with my face plastered up against the grimy, smudged glass, waking up to find a large damp spot of drool on the shoulder of my grey t-shirt. I had rubbed at it subconsciously for half an hour, hoping no one else had seen me drooling like a three year old and somehow feeling violated for sleeping in the presence of a few absolute strangers.
“Hey, kid.”
I was just tugging my suitcase out from inside the storage compartment beneath the bus when the driver popped his head out the doorway and peered down at me. I swiped a forearm across my already-sweaty forehead to brush my messy and already-sweaty mop of dark hair out of my eyes. He was an older guy, maybe in his mid-fifties, with grey hair all around and a neatly-trimmed little goatee. He had a sort of rumpled look about him that made me think that he had been driving that very same bus his entire adult life.
“What?”
The sticky air made my breath catch in my throat a little and it came out sort of wheezy. I felt myself flush a little, looking down to check if the drool stain was still visible on my left sleeve. It wasn’t, of course, because it had been dry when I last checked it over an hour ago. Still, it was embarrassing. I don’t know why it bothered me so much; there wasn’t a chance in hell I would ever see any of these stone faced, weary-looking Greyhound travellers ever again in my life.
“You got a ride comin’, or somethin’? I don’t wanna jus’ leave ya here. You bein’ a kid an’ all.” He ran a meaty hand through his hair and I could see that the heat was already getting to him, too; a small, dark circle of moisture was already forming under his arm. Technically, he was correct: at seventeen, I was supposedly still “a kid an’ all,” as if the matter of an ever shrinking portion of one year determined my maturity. I had, after all, just ridden through four states in seventeen hours by myself on one of the more questionable means of long distance transport.
“I’ll be fine,” I said, heaving my suitcase out and wiping my hands off on my faded old jeans. A bead of sweat began winding its way lazily from my neckline down my back, reminding me that this desolate, sun scorched concrete pad was probably the last place on earth I wanted to wait around for my ride.
“If you say so.” The driver looked to his left and to his right as if to confirm that yes, we were indeed at the Greyhound stop in Birmingham, before retreating to the top step. “Welp, you have a good one.” The door closed with a hiss, a sound that is nothing close to the clang of a prison door closing in the movies, and yet the sounds seemed strikingly similar at that moment. The diesel engine groaned as the bus eased away from the curb and began rumbling away like some ugly, squat caterpillar. The heat bore down on on the concrete pad and I felt like an ant, standing there alone on the mass expanse of grey with nothing but the low drone of traffic on the nearby interstate to keep me company.
“Have a good one,” he had said. A good what? A good day? It was already shaping up to be one of the more lousy days of my short life this far. I understood why Mom and Dad were shipping me off to his sister’s for the summer; there were a lot of affairs to set in order with Grandpa’s passing, and since I hadn’t managed to land myself a summer job I would just be dead weight around the house. Understanding didn’t soften either blow, though.
Perhaps he meant “have a good life,” as it seems implied when two strangers exchange a goodbye, knowing full well that they were never going to see each other ever again. If this were such a case, I was afraid I would have to disappoint him. I hadn’t ridden seventeen hours on a bus that reeked of body odor and stale tobacco because I was headed to some kind of Neverland. I sat down on my suitcase and looked down at my watch, only to remember with a sick feeling in my gut that I had thrown it as hard as I could into the Ohio river the night of the funeral. I had also thrown my last pack of cigarettes into the water; Marlboro Southern Cuts I convinced some guy to buy me at the Seven-Eleven one block west of the hospital. Smoking was a habit I tried to tell myself wasn’t actually a habit at all, but that was a pretty obvious lie because one cigarette a week had become one pack a week after the doctor said that chemo wasn’t working.
Grandpa knew I smoked, there was no way he couldn’t smell it on me when I came in to visit him in those last two months. He never said anything about it, though, even though Grandma had died of lung cancer when I was two. I had foolishly promised myself that if he got better I’d quit. Sitting there in that godforsaken Alabama heat, I would have killed for cold can of Dr. Pepper.
That, and a cigarette.535Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡLw7KNyrGU3
and then Add to home screen.