The old man set the bus driver badge down between the two paper cups and smoothed the newspaper clipping flat with a trembling hand. His name was Walter Piela, and he was eighty eight years old. He had driven a city bus for thirty one years, he told me, until the winter of 1999. The photograph in the clipping showed a bus lying on its side in a snowbank on Route 9 in Shrewsbury, the windows full of the red and blue of emergency lights. The headline said, Driver Stan Szymanski Suspended After Route 9 Crash. “Linda, your father saved twenty four people that morning,” Walter said. “And he let them put his name on the blame.”
He told it slowly, with his hands wrapped around the cup, and I did not interrupt once. On the fourteenth of December, he had been driving Route 9 on a day when the snow came down sideways. He was a diabetic, and he had skipped his breakfast. My father was riding the bus as a passenger, on his way to a dentist appointment, in his usual tie. Halfway up the hill in Shrewsbury, Walter felt his hands go cold. He felt the road swim. “I do not remember the next thirty seconds,” he said. “I woke up on the floor of the bus with the hands of your father on my collar. He was in the seat of the driver.”
My father had taken the wheel from a man who had passed out at forty miles an hour. He steered the bus into the snowbank on the right instead of the oncoming lane, and he stopped it on its side, with no one lost. Seven passengers went to the hospital with bruises and broken wrists. Twenty four more walked away. When the police arrived, Walter was still dazed, and my father, who knew that a driver with a medical lapse would lose his license, his pension and the insurance for the dialysis of his wife, said four words to the officer. “I was driving. Blame me.”
A second cup of coffee left on a window table gave one daughter the Saturday to bring the honor of her father back to Worcester.
I sat across from him with my hand pressed flat against my mouth. For twenty four years I had known my father as a man who wore a tie to the dentist. I had not known he was a man who would take a bus by the wheel. The Transit Authority suspended him without pay for six months, Walter said, and put a reprimand in his file. He lost almost six thousand dollars. He never complained. He never told my mother. He kept the clipping, he told Walter once, in his wallet, behind the picture of me and my brother.
“Why did you stop coming?” I asked. Walter looked into his coffee. “Linda, I promised him I would come back the day I could tell the truth, and not lose Dolores,” he said. “She was on dialysis for eleven years. If the Transit Authority had found out I was the driver, they would have taken the coverage.” He swallowed. “She passed in March, the same week as your father. I think they went the same night.” His eyes were very bright. “I have not slept since. I came here every Saturday, to the window, and I sat at the bar, and I could not make my legs carry me.”
My brother Ronnie arrived at that moment, with his wife, Pam. They had followed me from the house, I realized, because Ronnie had a spare key to my car and my phone location. He stood at the door of the donut shop in his good leather jacket with his face scarlet. He crossed the floor in four steps and snatched the clipping off the table. “So this is the scam,” he said, loudly. “Some old bum with a story.” He raised it over his head to tear it. The manager came out from behind the counter, and a young man in a Red Sox cap half rose. But Walter did not flinch. He only said, quietly, “Read the first line, son.”
Ronnie read the first line. I watched his lips move. Then he read the second. He lowered the clipping slowly, as if it were an animal that had bitten him, and the red drained from his face, and he sat down on the plastic chair beside me with a thump. Pam stood behind him with her purse clutched to her stomach. “Ronnie, what is it?” she whispered. He handed her the clipping. He did not look at me. He put his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands, a man of sixty one in a leather jacket, and he said to the floor, “Dad never told us. Dad never told us a thing.”
The money consequences were not what anyone expected. Walter would not take a cent of the four hundred and twelve thousand dollars. He told us that he had a pension and a daughter in Framingham and a cat. He asked, instead, that the money be put in a fund for the riders of Route 9, to pay for emergency training and medical cards for bus drivers across Worcester County. My brother, quiet and pale, agreed before I could say a word, and he signed the papers at our lawyer office that same week. Ronnie and I split the house. He apologized to me in the parking lot, awkwardly, with his hands in his pockets.
In the name of my father, Stanley, who passed in March and who wore a tie to the dentist and took a bus by the wheel, I started the Second Cup Fund. It pays for medical screenings, driver training and counseling for transit workers and their families across Worcester, Middlesex and Norfolk counties. In the first year, we helped one hundred and twelve drivers. A man of sixty, in a transit uniform, sat in the office and said, “I have not told my wife about my sugar.” I told him about a man who had skipped his breakfast, and I picked up the telephone.
On the first Saturday in May, Walter and I sat together at the table by the window, at the Dunkin on Route 9. I ordered two medium regulars, one with extra cream, and I set one across from him. He picked it up with both hands and drank, at last, the second cup. The girl behind the counter, who had known my father for years, wiped her eyes with her sleeve. Ronnie came in at seven fifteen, with Pam, and slid into the booth beside us without a word. Outside, a city bus pulled up to the stop. We watched it pause and then pull away into the morning.