She's wearing a thick blue belt that buckles over her groin and a shirt that is too tight across her chest.  The spaces between the buttons bulge.  Seated by the aisle, Grace follows those bulges up to the child’s face and smiles.
“Do you want to sit here?”
The girl nods and pulls her suitcase with a grunt that appears to embarrass her; she ducks her head in the crook of her sleeve.   The suitcase she places in the wire overhead rack is worn, pale blue and scratched along the sides.  Carefully, the girl steps over Grace’s knees and takes the seat by the window.
She reminds Grace of the young girl in that Kodak commercial.  The one where Harry Belafonte sings “Turn Around” and the little girl grows up in pictures taken in front of a large wooden door, a cross carved in the center. 
“Where you going, dear?” Grace asks.
“Baltimore,” she replies; eyes the color of an overcast sky.  Her hair, tied back with an elastic band, sticks together in shiny strands.   The girl smells of smoke.
“Alone?”  Grace smiles at her.
“Yes,” she says, pulling a Tiger Beat out of her backpack.
Grace looks at the cover; a group of men, with lots of hair; one with a silly green cap.  The girl looks up from the magazine, slapping the covers together. 
Grace presses her breast with her right hand as she nods at the girl, “I’m Grace,”
“My name is Margo.”
“Well, Margo, are those the Beatles?”
“No, the Monkees,” Margo says, “Excuse me.”  She spreads the magazine on her lap and turns away from Grace, flipping the pages. 
Grace rests her head against the bus seat, folding her hands in her lap.  Her head throbs.  Since she’d taken the aspirin over an hour ago, Grace knows the pain is not going away.  She should have drunk coffee; eaten something.  She waits to hear the engine start on the bus, thinking about the plane crash in Nebraska almost three weeks ago.  Forty two people died.  Grace isn’t flying on a plane ever again.
The way Margo’s head is bent over that magazine, Grace wonders if she is really reading it, and she thinks again about that Kodak commercial.  The little girl has brown braids, the same color as Margo’s ponytail.  She is smiling in the Kodak pictures.   Standing in front of that door.  Happy.  Grace had wanted children, but the ache is distant now.  Like a bad dream she can barely remember.  She watches Margo’s profile, thinking of the choice she made. 
Grace wonders why the girl is alone, guessing that Margo is under age.  Probably crossing state lines, illegally.  The girl’s hands tremble; the magazine rustles in her lap.  Margo glances up at her; scowling, her nostrils wide.  Grace thinks she recognizes fear. 
     Grace can see under her unkempt appearance that Margo has the one thing that matters in a woman: beauty.  She knows men will probably stare at Margo and women will eventually sneer at her.  They’ll call her names; spread rumors about her.   Home wrecker.  Whore.  Grace heard the ugliest of words from one of the wives who told her Grace had ruined her life. 
The bus pulls away from the traffic and onto the highway.  Soon they are passing dust, dirt, emptiness.  The road stretches before them in a brown landscape.  Grace is glad to leave it behind.  She turns away from Margo and the window, closing her eyes.

I was worried that old lady, Grace, would keep talking, asking me questions, but I was polite.  I said, “Excuse me.”
Every mile I put between me and Albuquerque, I feel a little better.
Baltimore’s near the Atlantic Ocean, on the mouth of Chesapeake Bay.  Real water, not like the mud they call a river, here.  It hardly ever looks like one.  Rio Grande.  Huh!  Nothing grand about it.
I hope Father Mateo can find someone else to write his letters.  He couldn’t write so I would meet him on the second floor of the rectory and he would read the newspaper until I got there.  I'd see him turning the pages with a straw he held in his mouth.  He always spit out the straw to say hello to me; that he looked forward to my visits.  I always wondered what he had done to make God so mad at him he couldn’t move. 
Father Mateo would tell me what to write.  I would write it, put the letters in envelopes for him and mail them.  He paid me five dollars. 
Most of Father's letters went to his brother in Baltimore.  Father Mateo was from there.   I've written the address so often I know it by heart.  It's High Street.  So that's where I'm headed.
I hope he can find someone who will smile at him, ignoring the wheelchair into which he has to be strapped.  Someone who won't tell anyone about the line of diapers that hang over the tub in the bathroom.  You can see them sometimes in the doorway as you walk down the rectory's hall to Father's office. 

I was careful to sit with a woman when I got on the bus but I probably shouldn’t have picked Grace.  Her eyes bulge out of her head and she has hair in two layers.  A top part sits on her head like a hat and I think it's fake.  It is a different color than the bottom part.  She keeps watching me; sort of creepy.   But she’s been asleep for awhile now.   I'm glad; I didn’t want to talk to her.  I stole Peggy’s magazine and brought a library book with me, since I didn’t have time to take it back.  I figured I’d just read all the way to Baltimore.  I’m glad the one magazine of Peggy’s I stuffed in my backpack has Davy Jones in it.  He’s the cutest of the Monkees.   Even cuter than Paul McCartney, who was my former favorite of all time.  But everyone likes him, so I also like George.  He’s a Catholic.  I wonder if he talks to God, and if he does, does God answer him?
My stomach is sick, but I'm gonna' smoke one of these cigarettes as soon as we are off this bus.  I don’t want to do it here.  Too many people will probably notice.  If anyone finds out I'm not old enough, I'll have to go back to Peggy and Larry.
  I'm trying to breathe the way Grandmother taught me.   Take a big breath through my nose, push it down, into my tummy.  It's supposed to make me stronger.
I’ve done it.   I’m on the bus.  The worst is over and I wish I felt better. 

Grace is dreaming of herself as a young woman.   She knows that must be the case by the triumphant double-takes of the men when they see her.  She’s at a party she thinks.  It is loud.  Liquor flows out of ice sculptures and champagne cascades from the top of a towering golden goblet.  Fancy finger food on silver trays is being served by black men with white gloves.  Men who are World War II young are talking to her, but she can’t make out what they are saying.  Their faces are not familiar.  One licks his lips.  They all laugh and she feels exhilarated.  Happy.  She is the focus of the attention.  Grace feels them touching her, nudging her.  Approving.
Their voices grow louder.  Harder.  There is something mean in their expressions.
  “Folks, if Denver is your destination, thanks for riding Greyhound.”
Grace feels like she is dropping.  Falling.  Her head is dizzy, her stomach is skipping.  She can smell something like chemicals, an industrial cleaner.  There is a mold smell too.  She wakes up.  Grace has drooled on the white square of cloth that covers the top of the bus seat.  The bus grinds to a halt with a loud screech.
  As she opens her eyes, Grace realizes her headache is worse.
“’Scuse me,” the girl beside Grace says, half standing, half bent under the overhead rack, trying to wiggle around Grace.
“Oh,” Grace says and pushes herself up off her seat.  She places her right palm over her forehead.  The pain is blinding, but she forces herself to smile.  Nausea is bubbling up her chest; she can feel it in the back of her throat.
“Are you all right?”  Margo asks, leaning on the back of the seat in front of them.
“I’ll be fine, dear.  Thanks for asking,” Grace replies and inches into the line of humanity that has formed in the aisle.  When she steps off the bus, Grace’s nausea disappears in the warm, night air, though her head still throbs.  She looks up at the stars.  They are lit across the sky; like jacks scattered on a sidewalk she’d pick up when she bounced a small rubber ball.  There is a full, gray and white pock marked moon.
Inside the ladies’ room, Grace stands, watching a black puddle swell over the floor as she waits her turn.  A toilet is leaking and its stall door opens.  Grace looks around her, stepping carefully to the side of the puddle.  She pulls the door to the stall closed behind her.
   After she hangs her purse on a hook fastened to the back of the door, Grace holds her nose.  The stink of shit, piss and blood is overwhelming.   She fumbles with her skirt, yanking at her underwear.  She is careful not to get close to the toilet seat.  The bowl is full of excrement, toilet paper.  Holding her breath, her head throbbing, Grace crouches over the bowl and a stream of blood mingles with urine.  The pain in her head feels like someone is shooting buck shot into her skull.  She presses her fingers on her forehead again, wiping herself with her free hand.  When she straightens her back, she moves as far from the toilet seat as she can and her stomach grazes the back of the stall’s door.  Before she pushes the door open, the room goes black and she slips down onto the wet, filthy floor.

I changed seats when we got back on the bus.   I don’t know why I feel I’m doing something bad.  Grace looks sad, but she smells.  I don’t want to sit next to her and there was an open seat one row down.
  The seat is next to a man who looks all right.  I reach for my magazine, ignoring him.  He spreads papers on a tray thing he has in his lap, and he uses a slide rule.
  It is getting pretty late, so I tuck my Tiger Beat in my backpack and shut my eyes.
“Am I bothering you?”  he asks.
I open my eyes, look at him and say, “No.”
“Because if I am, just tell me.”
I shake my head and turn away from him.
“I’m headed to St. Louis.  Gonna' catch a game at that new stadium and see that Gateway Arch, of course.  How about you?”
I pretend not to hear him, keeping my eyes shut.  But, of course, I can’t sleep.  The more I try not to think about him, the more I think of him.
“That woman you were sitting with before we got to Denver, is she your grandma?” 
His voice has a squeak in it that reminds me of Larry.  The thought pops my eyes open and I reach down under my seat, grab my backpack.
“Hey!  What I do?”
I move into the aisle.  The bus driver looks up at me in the rearview mirror, watching as I bump between the seats.  
My stomach clenches.  I gulp the awful, smelly bus air and try to swallow it; push it down, into my chest.  I don’t like it when someone looks at me.  I close my eyes and think of something else.  My grandmother.   She’d let me sit in her lap and read the newspaper to me.  The funny pages.  I’d follow her fingers; looking at the pictures while she told me the words. 
Grace is leaning her head against the window.  Her eyes are closed.  There is just blackness beyond her face.  I can’t even see a car light or a street lamp.  I sink into the bumpy, rough cushion of the seat beside her and she does not move.  She smells bad; like piss.  Her skirt has a black smear down the front.
A couple of women were standing on either side of her, holding her up, when she came out of the ladies’ room.  I could see them behind the glass wall of the bus station.  I hadn’t gone inside.  I was sneaking a smoke.  I like to hold the smoke inside and let it out with a big push.  Then I will feel it; happy.   Like I can do anything I want.  Be someone else. 
It was Larry who taught me how to smoke.  He’d bite the cigarette, holding one eye open while he lit the end with a match.  His other eye was closed, as though he was winking at me.  He had rough, broken skin on his fingers; black gunk that stayed caked on them.  It felt wrong but I took the cigarette he gave me.  I was no good anyway.  Might as well smoke.  When he was near me, I always felt like I was screaming under water.  My face would get hot. 
The smell of piss on Grace keeps me from being able to sleep.  The bus is quiet.  I hold my nose and take some deep breaths through my mouth.

Grace smiles, feeling the warmth of a body filling the seat next to her.  She can’t move her head away from the coolness of the window, though.  The crisp relief is spreading across her skull and she is sinking into comfort.  The best she’s felt in a long time.
She sees the men again.  They are pilots crowding the aisles in the lounge where she works.  They spread their legs out between the tables, taking up more space than anyone else, smoking Camel cigarettes.  They are shipping out to the Pacific in the morning and they are all cracking dirty jokes, cat calling to her.  But when she stands on the stage and sings, they stop and watch her; silent.
The applause is like a hard kiss; full of pleasure, longing.
Her voice has changed now, she can’t sing anymore.  She watched Bob Dylan last summer in New York; Forest Hills.  Maybe she could try to sing like him.  He sort of talks.  Not exactly Bing, or Nat, or even Frank, and Grace probably couldn’t pull it off.   Dylan's lyrics, like “Desolation Row” could describe her.  Cinderella, Bette Davis.  She remembers his response to the rude boos at that concert.   They’d learn to like his music he'd said.  Brave.  Then he had that motorcycle accident.  Has he been silenced forever?    
Grace opens her eyes to see who is sitting next to her.   Margo.  Grace knew she’d come back.  Margo does look like that little girl in the Kodak commercial; if she only had braids instead of that ponytail.
She taps Margo’s shoulder, “Why are you going to Baltimore?” 
Margo turns towards her.  Grace can’t see her face in the dim light. 
“I dunno,” she says.
“You’re not old enough to be on this bus alone, are you?”
“Yes I am!”
“You can’t be sixteen.”
“How do you know?”
“I’m sorry, dear.  It’s none of my business.  I’m just a nosy old woman who can sense a girl in trouble when I see her.”
Margo’s head snaps up, slapping the back of her bus seat.  She shrugs, and turns away, “I’m gonna’ sleep now.”
Grace leans her own head back; the headache has vanished.  Free.  She feels no pain at all.  Her mind doesn’t focus on her skull anymore.  She thinks about her voice.  Of course she’d hoped she’d make it big.  Become a star. 
  You might have five good years left, Grace.
Grace believed the young woman meant no harm and felt nothing when she watched her pull off fake eyelashes in their hole-in-the-wall dressing room at the back of the lounge.  
But her words had stung.  Grace was thirty-five years old then and she had looked it; a large wide streak of grey in her hair had to be hennaed each week.  Her face had grown leaner; she’d lost the softness in her cheeks; lines had formed by her smile.  She remembered looking in the mirror and thinking of how she had changed.  She was exhausted; no longer full of anticipation.   The bombs had pummeled Pearl Harbor and everyone was signing up, wanting in on the action.  Babies.  Inexperienced.   The world had been turned over to them and she was discarded.   
   The quiet one – in horn-rimmed glasses, no uniform -- offered to take her to New Mexico.   She had survived an abortion but she couldn’t talk about it.  The shame she had felt.  She’d been a fool to think he would thank her when she finally told him.  Grace could see the disgust on his face.  She should have had the baby.  By now, the child would have been older than this girl, Margo.  
She feels hot.  Grace stretches her arm out and smacks Margo’s shoulder, “I’m sorry.” 
  Margo nods and turns away from her.
Grace opens her jacket, feeling along the lining for her envelope.  “Here, I have something for you,” she says, popping the safety pin on the envelope.  “Give me your hand.”
“What?”  Margo says.  Perplexed.  “What is it?”
Grace pulls out the envelope, threading her fingers over the bills, and plucking a twenty.  She stuffs it in Margo’s hand.
“Oh, no.  I can’t,” Margo says.
“Yes you can, dear,” Grace says.  Exhaustion is covering her like a shadow that used to spread along her stucco patio in the afternoon.  She feels the tips of her fingers tingle.  “Take it.  I have plenty more.”  Grace spears the safety pin through the lining again inside her jacket and pats the spot where the envelope is pinned.  “Men will lust after you and women will hate you. Life is not easy for beautiful women,” Grace says.  “Remember that.”

Row after row of corn.   Tall, bright green; reaching for the sky.  We pass them and more of them.  Their leaves climb up the stalks and flap in the wind as though they are waving at me.  I never would have guessed there were so many corn fields out here.  The blue sky and the green corn stalks spin past us, fast, when I look at them from Grace’s window.
     Grace gave me twenty dollars last night.  For nothing, mumbling about beauty?  Ha!  Larry would have laughed at her.  He said I wasn’t anything but a piece of shit.  That pissed me off.  I tried to hit him, but he slammed me down.  My head felt like it was tumbling in a clothes dryer and I couldn’t breathe.   I tried to tell Peggy what he did, but she didn’t believe me.  Called me a liar. 
I wasn't going to let him do it anymore.  I can't think about it, either.   I try to block the memory, but I still see him.  Hear him unbuckling his belt.  Feel his palm on the back of my head, pushing me down, down.  His smell.  I can't forget how he smelled.  Like decay.  Something rotten.  I got away from him.  I took all the money I’d earned writing letters for Father Mateo and bought a bus ticket to Baltimore.
We must be in Missouri by now.  It’s bright out and Grace is still sleeping.  The bus has woken up in spurts; I can hear people grunting, sneezing, coughing.  Someone has just made a loud “ah-h-h-h” sound like he is yawning.  I yawn too and stretch my arms out.  Oops.  I smack Grace in the face. 
“Sorry!”
She is still sleeping.  She hasn’t moved.  Her mouth is open.  She looks gray.  She feels cold.
“Hey Grace,” I nudge her.  Oh my God, she falls on my shoulder!  Heavy.  Really heavy.  I push her back up on her seat.  She’s really, really asleep, or....
She’s dead!  I want to scream.  But I don’t want to cause the bus to crash.  The green/blue of the corn and sky spins past us.  I feel sick.  Grace is dead. 
  I was there when my grandmother fell onto the kitchen floor.
She was stirring something in a pot.  I liked it when she cooked and I sat near her doing my homework.  I felt safe near her.  Peggy usually didn't come downstairs to join us until dinner was on the table.  Grandmother was humming.  She always did that, “da da da da.”  The tune was never anything I knew.  Grandma didn’t like the Beatles or the Monkees.  She talked about Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey, Glenn Miller.  She’d tell me some of the names of the songs she hummed -- String of Pearls, In the Mood, I’ll Never Smile Again.  I was listening to her, staring at the numbers on my Algebra paper and she just stopped.  I remember looking up.  I was about to say something to her and I watched her fall.  I couldn’t push the chair back quickly enough.  No.  That’s a lie.  I couldn’t move at all.  I just let her fall.  Thump.  Her head hit the kitchen floor and she was dead.
The smell of piss is stronger and I realize Grace has peed her clothes.  I want to jump up, to get away.  Stop the bus driver and tell him that Grace is dead, but I am frozen in my seat again.  I can’t move.
And then I think of it.  I turn to look at the folks on the other side of the aisle.  They are quiet.  Their eyes are shut.  I can see the man who was sitting with the papers over his lap behind them.  He's asleep too!  I move over Grace, peering into the space between Grace’s and my seats.  The people behind me are reading.  Neither is looking up.  I pop the button; slip my hand into her jacket, feeling along her breast for that envelope.  My heart is pounding in my ears.  My head feels bad.  The stink of the bus and the piss curl in my nostrils as I pick the safety pin.  The envelope of money slips out and I crunch it with my fist.  It is thick!  I forget the smell as I hold the envelope.  It is gray and white, like the color of the moon, and I tuck it into the front of my shirt.