🔹 PART 7 – Call Me Driver
January came in sharp and gray.
Syracuse was frozen over, its trees like brittle bones, sidewalks slick with ice, and daylight gone by four. James moved slower now. Not from illness—just from the sudden lack of momentum. For thirty years, the bus route had been his pulse. Without it, he sometimes sat in his chair wondering if the world still needed him to show up.
Emily noticed. She didn’t say anything at first.
But she did things.
She taped old passenger thank-you notes above the radiator. She clipped the article from the community paper titled “Farewell, Route 7’s Quiet Hero.” She brewed the coffee stronger.
Still, he drifted.
Until one Saturday morning when the phone rang.
James let it ring once. Twice.
Emily picked up.
“Mr. Farrow?” a woman’s voice asked. “Is he there? It’s about the ‘Ride With Dignity’ program.”
She furrowed her brow. “Who’s calling?”
“Linda Poole. I coordinate volunteer drivers for the county’s senior shuttle.”
Emily turned toward her father, raising an eyebrow.
He blinked. “The what-now?”
“You signed up two weeks ago,” Linda said through the line. “We’ve got someone who specifically asked for you.”
James took the phone, confusion giving way to curiosity.
“Hello?”
A pause. Then a soft, familiar voice.
“Mr. Farrow? It’s Della. From your route. I don’t drive anymore. They told me I could ask for someone I trusted.”
James covered his mouth for a second. His voice cracked. “Where to, Miss Della?”
“Church,” she said. “Same as always.”
That first shuttle drive was just ten minutes each way. But James came home lighter, sharper.
“She wore her purple coat,” he told Emily that afternoon. “Said her late husband always liked it.”
The next week, he drove a veteran to his physical therapy. The week after that, a woman and her blind dog to a park she hadn’t visited since her stroke.
He kept a little notebook again.
Names. Routes. Birthdays.
Old habits.
Good ones.
One afternoon, Emily joined him on a drive to pick up a man named Marvin.
Marvin was 84, legally blind, and fiercely opinionated.
“Your dad ever tell you he once let me sing Elvis on the bus intercom?” he asked as he climbed aboard.
Emily blinked. “He did not.”
“Smart man,” Marvin grinned. “Wasn’t my best performance.”
James chuckled from the driver’s seat. “You cleared out half the back row.”
They dropped Marvin off at the pharmacy and waited.
Emily leaned forward. “You like this?”
James nodded. “It’s the same thing I’ve always done. Just slower. Closer.”
“You ever miss the big bus?”
“Sometimes. But this?” He tapped the dash. “This is more… personal. No noise between people.”
She smiled. “A transfer ticket.”
He looked at her through the rearview mirror. “Exactly.”
That night, James pulled a box from his closet and set it on the table.
Emily looked up from her laptop. “What’s that?”
“Your mother’s journals,” he said.
She blinked. “She kept journals?”
“Every year since she was twenty.”
He opened the lid. Dozens of leather-bound notebooks, all neatly labeled with dates.
“I couldn’t read them after she died,” he said. “But I think maybe it’s time you did.”
Emily picked one at random. 1993. The year her mother had her.
She opened it.
March 3:
Emily said “bus” today. Clear as daylight. James cried. Said it’s the only word that’s ever felt like his word.I watched them through the window after dinner—her crawling, him humming Glen Campbell and clapping like she just cured the common cold.
I never thought a life this small could feel this full.
Emily pressed her hand to the page.
“She saw you,” she said.
James nodded, eyes glassy. “She always did.”
Days passed like drifting snow.
They fell into a rhythm.
James drove his seniors.
Emily studied at the library, reworking her transfer application.
They ate dinner together—mostly leftovers, always with Sammy curled under the table, occasionally thumping his tail if someone dropped meatloaf.
One afternoon, a letter arrived.
Handwritten. No return address.
Inside was a photo.
A younger James, in uniform, with a woman beside him. Not Margaret.
Nora.
Emily stared.
The letter was short.
James,
I saw the article in the paper.
You look good behind that wheel.I still hum that awful cassette you made.
No regrets anymore. Just gratitude.
— Nora
James held the photo for a long time.
“I thought she vanished,” he said.
Emily studied the woman’s smile. “She didn’t. She just waited until it didn’t hurt.”
He nodded slowly. “She gave me a goodbye I never asked for. But maybe one I needed.”
Emily put the photo in the drawer with her mom’s journals.
Both stories belonged in the same house now.
Later that evening, Emily and James walked Sammy down Spencer Street. The air was crisp, the sidewalks still patchy with snow.
A bus passed them.
Route 7.
The driver gave a gentle beep.
James tipped his hat.
Emily looked at him.
“Do you ever wish you’d done something else?”
He thought for a moment. “Sometimes. But that feeling never stays.”
“Why not?”
“Because I remember who got on my bus. Not what I missed.”
She squeezed his hand.
“You never missed a thing, Dad.”
He looked up at the sky.
“Transfer ticket,” he said.
“To where?”
“Doesn’t matter,” he smiled. “I’m still riding.”