The Last Shift

On her last day as a bus driver, Maureen drove the same route through Glasgow eleven times, the way she had on thousands of other days over thirty-four years.

She had expected a speech at the depot. There had been a card, a sheet cake with a bus drawn on it, and a manager who read her name wrong. She had decided that was fine. A bus driver gets people from one place to another. Nobody remembers the vehicle.

At seven, Mr. Brannigan got on at his usual stop and said, “Cheers, driver,” as he had for nine years. At the third stop Mrs. Doyle did not board. Maureen frowned, until she saw her standing at the curb with her shopping trolley, waving the earlier bus past. When Maureen pulled in, she lowered the bus a little at the curb, the way she always did, and Mrs. Doyle climbed on.

“Twelve years I’ve let the early one go by on Fridays,” Mrs. Doyle said. “You do that thing with the step. I never had to ask.”

Maureen had thought it was just the timetable.

At eight, a young woman in nurse’s scrubs stood by the front and watched her for a few stops. “You won’t remember me,” she said. “I used to run for the 7:40 every morning in school. You always waited.”

“I never waited.”

“Every day. Sometimes you’d sit there with the doors open, checking your mirrors,” the young woman said.

Maureen did not remember it. For her it had only been a rule: nobody gets left at a stop they can still reach.

By the last run her cheeks hurt from not knowing what to do with her face. She parked at the depot, switched off the engine, and sat for a minute with the doors shut. The bus ticked as it cooled. The seats were empty and smelled like rain and other people’s days.