Larkspur, Population Unchanged

Larkspur had not grown by a single stoplight in thirty-one years, which Mara found obscurely comforting, the way it's comforting to find an old photograph still fits its frame.

She drove past the house first — she couldn't have said why, except that some instructions aren't written down anywhere and you follow them regardless. New owners had painted it a blue her mother never would have chosen, and put up a swing set where the vegetable garden used to be, and Mara sat at the curb long enough that a woman came out onto the porch to look at her looking.

She didn't stop. She drove to the Aspen Road bus stop instead, which still existed, an aluminum bench under an oak tree that had gotten enormous in the intervening decades, the way trees do while people are busy elsewhere becoming other people.

There was nothing to see. That was the strange part. No plaque, no scar in the asphalt, nothing except an ordinary bench under an ordinary tree where, thirty-one years ago, a dog had slipped a leash and a mother had run and a seven-year-old girl had learned, far too young, that the world could take something from you on a perfectly ordinary Tuesday.

The man who answered the door of the small house behind the bus stop was somewhere north of eighty, moving slow but sure, the specific carefulness of a person who has fallen exactly once too often and adjusted his whole life around not doing it again.

"You're going to want to talk about the bus," he said, before Mara had said a word, the second time in this whole strange errand that a stranger had known her purpose before she'd opened her mouth. "I've been the school district's driver on this route for forty-one years. I always figured somebody from that family would come around asking, eventually. Didn't figure it'd take three decades and a different family altogether." He held the door wider. "You'd better come in, Vance girl. I've been carrying my half of this a long time too, and there's no sense doing it standing up."