He takes the long way on Thursdays

You want to know about ramps? Nobody measures. Not one of them ever put a level on the thing.

The men at the church poured theirs themselves, two Saturdays, mixing it right there in the lot off Westchester, and it comes down off the side door at a pitch you could sled on. Hermano, look what we did for you. What am I supposed to say to that. I said it's beautiful.

Milly would have said something. Milly said everything to everybody the whole time I knew her and they loved her for it. Four years in July.

Yari went and got a tape from the hardware place on Westchester and measured the bathroom door herself. Twenty-six inches. This building went up in 1953 and nobody back then was thinking about me. That's my daughter, twenty-seven years old, she's got a whole folder just for the insurance. The calendar on the fridge is all in her handwriting. Her name's on the lease.

Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, the center off Zerega. Kidneys. People always want to hook that up to the 2018 thing and it doesn't hook up, it's its own separate situation. Four hours in there.

They got a TV bolted up in the corner playing the news with the sound off, and a man two seats down from me who reads westerns. Paperbacks, the old kind with the spines all cracked. I asked him one time where he even gets them and he said his sister brings them up from a place in Mount Vernon, a box at a time, and he doesn't pick, he just reads whatever's on the top. Must be forty of them by now. He told me the name of one and I forgot it before the machine was done with me.

Before Curtis it was a different driver every couple of weeks. You ever have somebody help you who never asked how? One of them came at me from behind and went up under my arms like I was a bag of cement and my shoulder was no good for nine days. I still got a bar up in the doorway of my room. Been pulling on that thing since I was fifteen at Monroe.

Curtis, first morning, a year and a half ago January. He didn't touch anything. He said tell me how you want it. That's all. Nobody had said that to me. Not at the hospital. Not in this building.

He's got a knee that's going. His mother's in a home up in Yonkers and he sees her Sundays and it costs him whatever it costs him, he doesn't say the number and I don't ask. He came up in Wakefield off White Plains Road, up by the end of the 2.

You ever ride that line all the way up? My cousin had a place off 241st and you could hear the trains all night and he used to tell me you stop hearing it after a while. He never stopped hearing it. He moved out to Coram. Anyway.

Curtis calls me Ish now. He called me Pop for about the first month and then he stopped, and I noticed the day he stopped.

Somewhere in there he started bringing a coffee. Light, two sugars. I never told him two. He just came in one morning with two and that's how it's been since.

Now here's the thing about Thursdays. The morning tech at the center comes in at quarter past eight on a Thursday instead of quarter to, so the whole board slides and your eight o'clock is whenever. Curtis figured that out before I did.

So on Thursdays he doesn't run straight up the avenue. He goes down Story, past that place with the pastelillos that's only good before ten, and he'll roll along at nothing and hit every light. Twenty minutes. Twenty-five if the school's letting in.

And before you start, he's a driver. That's the job. They tell them at the orientation be pleasant with the riders, don't rush anybody. He's pleasant with everybody, I've seen him with the lady we pick up on Underhill, he carries her bag in for her.

Three weeks ago he took it out to Clason Point and put the engine off. We sat there maybe four minutes looking at the water. You ever been out there? You can see the Whitestone from that spot and the planes coming down into LaGuardia one behind the other, and if you never sat and watched them you wouldn't believe how many there are. Nobody said let's stop. He just stopped, and I didn't say anything either.

Then last Thursday he pulled up at the light by Soundview Avenue and turned the radio all the way off. He likes that old soul station. He hums along and he's not good at it. He said, let me ask you something. And the light changed and he pulled off and he never asked it.

Six days. I have thought about that question for six days and I don't have the first idea what it was.

Mi mamá used to say Dios aprieta pero no ahoga. She said it about the rent, mostly. Every first of the month.

Sunday Yari's doing the billing, because she does the billing, and Access-A-Ride's got the trips logged with the times on them. She's at the table with the laptop and she says, Papi, why is Thursday forty minutes. She's not mad. She's never mad. I said Westchester's a mess by the school in the morning. She said okay. Then she wrote something on the pad she keeps next to the laptop, and my daughter doesn't write things down and then forget about them.

Same Sunday, after service, Hermano Peña gets me by the doors. The church bought a van off a congregation in New Rochelle that closed up, and it's got a lift on it, a real hydraulic one. He's been up under it in the lot all week with his son. No more Access-A-Ride, hermano. We got you now. Whenever you need to go, we take you. Free, obviously. You don't pay a church.

The pastor's wife took my hand while he's saying it. Yari's standing right there and she says it's a blessing, and it is a blessing, that's not me being smart, it's genuinely a blessing. Thirty-one years I pushed a wax machine around a middle school on Rosedale Avenue and I know exactly what it takes for eleven people to get a van running for one man.

I said let me look at the schedule. Out loud. To the two people who keep the schedule.

So now it's Wednesday night. Yari's asleep in the front, she does that, she falls asleep at ten-forty and wakes up at one and goes to bed properly like it's a whole separate night.

Maybe the lift on that van is the wrong kind for me. It isn't, his son had the pictures on his phone and I looked at every one of them. Maybe the insurance wants the log off the service and that's a whole thing, except Yari keeps the log and she keeps it better than they do. It's a better van and it's the same three mornings. Hermano Peña put his own knuckles into that lift.

And I couldn't tell you what I'd be saying no for, either. Nothing's happened.

Tomorrow says six-forty, Z. Same as it says every week, in her handwriting.

She's got that show on where people walk through a house and say what's wrong with the kitchen. Volume's on two. Her arm's hanging off the side of the couch the way it does and tomorrow she'll say her shoulder hurts.