A woman climbs onto the bus and sits opposite an old man, who looks up at her and greets her; they have met before.
“Hey, how are you.”
“Well… my dad’s in the hospital, and I’ve been feeling kinda guilty about that—see ‘cause I told my brother I’d go see him yesterday, but I wasn’t feeling too good, so I figure… why… bring cold. germs. in there, you know? So I’m going to see him tomorrow afternoon. He doesn’t say a whole lot, but when he does… he says funny stuff."
She looks out the window.
"Yeah it’s been two weeks since last Thursday when he went in, and he has a looong road ahead of him. He wants to leave, he, he wants to go home, he wants to walk home—but that’d be an extra extra long walk. He keeps saying everybody’s gotta be more quiet all the time, but I said ‘Dad, c’mon, it’s a hospital.’”
Two minutes idly pass.
“My dad doesn’t like being in the hospital, at all. But he has no choice.”
“There’s a red tree over there.”
“Oh yeah, that looks like it’s a maple tree, in the fall they turn a beautiful, a beautiful red.”
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