Nine hours into the overnight bus to Memphis, the man in the seat behind me hooked his bare foot over my armrest, and when I asked him to move it he said, “You bought a seat, lady, not the air around it.” I never raised my voice. But by the dawn rest stop, every person on that bus was staring at his feet.
I was riding fourteen hours to watch my son graduate from basic training, in the only good coat I owned, on a ticket that cost me a week of overtime.
It was a little after one in the morning.
The lights were down and most people were asleep under their jackets.
Something warm and damp pressed against the back of my wrist.
I pulled my arm in and turned on my phone light.
A heel. Then five long toes, curled over the plastic edge like they paid rent there.
The smell came a second later. Old cheese and wet carpet.
I twisted around in my seat.
He was maybe forty, big shoulders, a gray hoodie, one of those horseshoe pillows around his neck. His sneakers were kicked under my seat, and one of them was leaning on my bag.
“Hey. Your foot’s on my armrest,” I said.
He didn’t open his eyes. “Then move your arm.”
“I was sitting here first.”
“You bought a seat, lady, not the air around it.” He finally looked at me, chin up, half a smile. “Bad back. Feet go up or I don’t sleep.”
“Put them up on your own seat, then.”
“Can’t. The guy next to me is huge.” He tipped his head at the snoring man beside him, then at my other side. “You got a whole second armrest right there. Go use that.”
He pushed his toes forward an inch. Right into the spot my elbow had just left.
Then he pulled his hood down over his eyes.
I sat with my arms folded in my lap for forty minutes.
Every curve in the road, his foot slid a little closer to my shoulder.
Once his big toe touched the collar of my coat.
I had paid for that coat in four installments. It was NOT going to smell like him.
I turned around again.
“Sir. I’m asking nicely. Take your foot down.”
He groaned like I was his wife.
“It’s a FOOT. Everybody’s got two. You’re acting like I stuck it in your sandwich.”
The woman in the window seat beside me had been knitting in the dark the whole time. She set her needles down.
“That is filthy,” she said. “I can smell it from over here.”
He laughed out loud. “Then you two can swap seats. Problem solved.”
Somebody across the aisle said, “Shh.”
He tugged the hood back over his face.
I faced front.
“Okay,” I said, to nobody.
The woman next to me looked at me sideways. She was small, white hair cut short, a purple fleece zipped up to her chin, a tin of peppermints balanced on her knee.
“Elsie,” she said, and put out her hand. “Seventy-four. Thirty-one years running a school cafeteria. I know a boy who needs a lesson when I see one.”
I shook it and told her my name.
Then we waited.
Around half past two, the breathing behind us changed. It went long and heavy and wet.
His foot hadn’t moved. If anything it had settled in deeper.
The window had a sticker on it shaped like a peach, half peeled off, and I picked at the corner while I thought.
Then I leaned over to Elsie.
“Do you have what I think you have in that purse?”
She looked at his toes. Then at me. The corner of her mouth went up.
“Honey, I’ve got two of them.”
She unsnapped the purse and passed one across without another word.
“Watch the aisle,” I said. “If he stirs, cough.”
“I’ll cough like I’m dying.”
It took me maybe three minutes. His foot never twitched once.
Elsie held her phone light low against her knee the whole time, and when I was done she picked the needles back up like nothing had happened.
I handed the thing back. She dropped it in the purse and snapped it shut.
Then I spread my coat over my lap and closed my eyes.
I didn’t sleep.
At ten after six the lights came up.
The driver, a gray-haired man named Marvin with a voice like a gravel road, came over the speaker. “Twenty minutes here, folks. Restrooms are inside. Shoes on, please.”
Behind me, the man stretched. His foot slid off my armrest at last.
He didn’t put his shoes on.
He stood up yawning and padded barefoot into the aisle with his phone in his hand.
He made it four rows.
A teenage girl with headphones glanced down, glanced up, and covered her whole face with both hands.
The guy behind her leaned out to see what she saw, and then he was laughing so hard he had to grab the seatback.
A woman near the front said, “Oh my GOD.”
Somebody held up a phone.
Then two more.
Marvin turned all the way around in the driver’s seat and took his glasses off.
The man stopped dead in the middle of the aisle.
“What?” he said. “WHAT?”
Nobody answered him.
Elsie took a peppermint out of the tin and unwrapped it very slowly.
He looked down at his feet.
The red started at his neck and climbed all the way to the edge of his hood.
He spun around and stared straight down the aisle at our row.
“You,” he said. “WHAT DID YOU DO TO MY FEET?”
Elsie leaned over and patted my hand.
“Go on, Dena,” she said. “Tell him.”
Ten after six
I stood up into the aisle so he could see me.
“Your toenails are red,” I said. “All ten. Permanent marker. And the top of your right foot says NOT YOUR ARMREST.”
It did, too. Black block capitals running from the ankle down to the toes, big enough to read from four rows off. The red on the left foot was sloppy. That one had been stretched out flat on the floor of the aisle, beside my seat, and I’d had to do it mostly by feel.
He bent over and rubbed the top of his foot with his thumb. Then he licked the thumb and rubbed again.
The second R in ARMREST went a little gray. That was all.
“This comes OFF,” he said.
“No,” Elsie said, around her peppermint. “It doesn’t.”
The girl with the headphones had her hands down from her face now and her phone up instead. The guy who’d been laughing was wiping his eyes with the heel of his hand. Somebody near the back read it out loud, slow, like a road sign. “Not. Your. Armrest.”
Marvin put his glasses back on. He unbuckled and stood up at the front of the bus, and he was taller standing than he’d looked in the seat.
“All right,” he said. “Whose marker is that?”
Elsie raised her hand like it was roll call.
“Mine,” she said. “I’ve got two.”
The Nashville stop
I bought the coat in March, at the department store out by the interstate, on the plan where they hang it in the back with your name on a tag and you come in every two weeks with forty-one dollars cash.
Navy wool. Real buttons, not snaps. It was the first coat I’d ever owned that wasn’t from a church sale.
Bryson called from basic on a Sunday in September. They got three minutes. He used one of them to say, “Mom, wear something nice. The families sit right where we march past.”
So I made the fourth payment early.
The ticket was two hundred and thirty-eight dollars round trip. I worked five ten-hour nights in a row to cover it, and I’d have worked six.
The bus stopped in Nashville a little before ten that night. Twenty minutes. Elsie got off and came back with a turkey sandwich in a paper bag, and before she put it in the rack over our heads she took a black marker out of the side pocket of her purse and printed on the bag, in capitals, MINE and then SUN.
There was a red one in the pocket too. I saw the cap.
“Habit,” she said, when she caught me looking. “If it’s not labeled, it walks.”
That was all we said to each other until one in the morning.
He got on in Nashville too. Last one up the steps, phone held out sideways in front of his face, talking to it.
“Night bus to Memphis, y’all. Let’s see who we get.”
He swung a duffel bag up into the rack one-handed, easy, like it was a bag of bread. The big man in the seat behind me was already asleep against the window. My guy dropped into the aisle seat beside him, right behind me, and put his phone face down on his knee.
I didn’t think anything of any of it. People talk to their phones now.
That was the Nashville stop. Eight hours later, here was Marvin, walking down the aisle toward our row with his keys in his hand.
And here was the man in the gray hoodie, with his phone up again.
This time it was pointed at me.
Marvin
“She assaulted me,” he said. “In my sleep. I want the police.”
Marvin didn’t look at him. He looked at his feet.
“Son, go put your shoes on.”
“I’m not touching anything. That’s evidence.” He turned the phone to his own toes and then back to my face. “Say hi, lady. Say hi to everybody.”
The woman near the front, the one who’d said oh my God, was out of her seat now. She was about my age, in a sweatshirt with cardinals on it and a travel pillow still around her neck.
“I’m sorry,” she said to me. “I don’t care what he did. You don’t put your hands on a sleeping person. That’s not right.”
A couple of heads nodded.
I could feel the bus turning. It’s a thing you can feel, like a floor going soft.
“His foot was on my armrest for five hours,” I said.
“So you tell the driver,” the cardinal woman said.
Marvin cleared his throat.
“She did tell the driver.” He pointed his keys at me. “Came up front about two in the morning and asked me to pull over. I said I can’t stop a coach on the interstate over a foot. I said I’d handle it here.” He looked at me over his glasses. “Here’s here, ma’am. You couldn’t give me four hours?”
“See?” The man in the hoodie was almost happy. “She PLANNED it. She went up front, she got told no, and she came back and did this.”
“Is that true?” the cardinal woman said.
It was true. Every word of it.
I didn’t say anything.
He took that as a win. He went into the station with a bottle of hand sanitizer from his hoodie pocket, barefoot across the wet parking lot, and half the bus went in after him to use the restroom and see.
He came back out four minutes later.
The skin on top of his foot had gone pink from scrubbing. The letters were still there, black on pink now, which was worse.
He held the phone up at me again, close enough that I could see my own face on it.
“I got the whole night on here,” he said. “Every second. You’re done, lady.”
Five to two
He did have the whole night on there. That part was true too.
I’d seen it at five to two in the morning, on my way back from Marvin.
The bus was dark except for the floor lights. I came down the aisle holding the seatbacks, and when I got to our row he was right there below me in the aisle seat, hood down over his eyes, mouth open.
Asleep, I’d have said. Except his phone was lit up in his lap, and his thumb was moving on it.
The screen was a video. It was the back of my head.
My hair. My shoulder. The navy collar of my coat, and his big toe coming into the frame from the bottom edge and resting on it. Then my own voice, small and tinny: “Sir. I’m asking nicely. Take your foot down.”
And under that, his voice, low, from under the hood. “Watch. She’s gonna turn around again.”
Across the bottom of the video it said lady on the night bus thinks she owns the armrest pt 2.
Thirty-eight thousand views. The number went up while I stood there.
His thumb scrolled down. Part one was just his foot on my armrest, filmed from his side, my sleeve at the edge. It said bad back my ass lol.
The name on the account was kylewagsontheroad.
He didn’t look up. I don’t think he knew anybody was standing over him. I went around his knees and sat down, and Elsie looked at my face and didn’t ask.
I found the account on my own phone. It took a while, with the signal going in and out between towns. I saved both videos the way Bryson had shown me before he left, the two buttons at once, and then I checked my pictures to be sure they were really there.
They were. Both of them. His foot, my collar, his voice.
I put the phone face down on my knee, the same way he did.
Half an hour later his breathing went long and wet, and his phone slid off his lap onto the floor, and I leaned over to Elsie and asked her what was in her purse.
So when he stood there at the rest stop with his phone up in my face, telling me I was done, I wasn’t thinking about the police.
I was thinking that I had his whole night on mine too.
Thirty-eight thousand
“Show me, then,” Marvin said to him.
Kyle held the phone out. Marvin didn’t take it. He bent down to look.
The first thing up was something Kyle had posted from the restroom. His two feet on a tile floor, red toenails, the black letters. This psycho on my bus wrote on me while I slept. Tag the bus company. Already people under it, laughing, half of them at him.
“That’s me after,” Kyle said. “Go back. She’s been harassing me since one o’clock. Go back to the one where she turns around.”
He scrolled back himself and pressed play.
My collar. His toe. My voice. “Sir. I’m asking nicely.”
Then his voice from under the hood. “Watch. She’s gonna turn around again.”
Marvin looked at the screen for a while after it stopped.
“Play the one before that,” I said.
Kyle didn’t. So I took out my own phone and held it out to Marvin with part one already up.
Kyle’s foot on my armrest, filmed from his own seat, steady and in focus. Across the bottom, in his letters, bad back my ass lol.
Marvin took my phone out of my hand. He held it at arm’s length because of his glasses and he read it out loud, every word, in that gravel voice, so the people standing at the back of the bus could hear.
“Bad back my ass, lol.”
The cardinal woman put her hand over her mouth. Not the way the girl had.
Marvin handed my phone back. Then he looked up at the rack over Kyle’s seat, at the duffel bag Kyle had swung up there in Nashville with one hand.
“Your back looks all right to me, son,” he said.
Shoes on, please
Kyle talked for a long time after that.
“It’s CONTENT. You know what content is? I got eighty thousand people. That’s my job. She didn’t have to turn around. Nobody made her turn around. And you.” He pointed at me with the phone. “You put your hands on my body. I don’t care what I posted, that’s a crime. That’s a crime in every state. I’ll have that video of my feet on every news site by lunch. I’ll find out where you’re going, lady. Graduation, right? I heard you tell her. Which fort? I’ll come stand in the bleachers in my bare feet, how about that?”
I didn’t answer him.
“And the old lady’s an accessory. She handed you the thing. Grandma’s going down too.”
Elsie ate her peppermint.
Then the big man in the seat behind me stood up. I’d thought for nine hours he was asleep. He had to duck under the rack, and when he was all the way up he was a head taller than Marvin.
“I’m the huge guy,” he said. “Nick.”
Kyle stopped.
“You had room,” Nick said. “You had my whole knee if you wanted it. I moved my legs to the window at midnight so you’d quit kicking me.” He looked at Marvin. “He told me in Nashville he needed a good one tonight. For the channel. He was looking down the aisle picking.”
“That’s a lie,” Kyle said.
“Okay,” Nick said, and sat back down.
Marvin rubbed his face with one hand.
“Here’s what happens,” he said. “You take down every video with her in it, right now, in front of me. Both ladies. Then you put your shoes on and you sit in the last row by the restroom, and you ride it out to Memphis. Or you stay right here, and the next coach through is at nine-forty.”
“You can’t make me delete anything.”
“No,” Marvin said. “I sure can’t.”
He stood there with his keys.
Kyle looked at the parking lot. It was still mostly dark, and cold, and there was nothing out there but the station and the pumps.
He deleted them. Part one, then part two, and he turned the screen to Marvin each time with his jaw out. He kept the one of his feet.
Then he bent over under my seat and dug out his sneakers. One of them had been leaning on my bag all night, and when he pulled it free the bag tipped over into the aisle.
He didn’t pick it up. He carried the shoes to the back of the bus and didn’t put them on.
“Old bitch,” he said, on the way past. He meant me. Elsie took it as a compliment anyway.
I picked up my bag. When I sat down and put my coat back on, the cuff of the right sleeve caught the window light.
There was a red streak across it. Two inches long. Where I’d rested my hand on my lap at half past two with the cap still off.
Elsie saw it the same time I did.
“Cold water and dish soap won’t touch that, honey,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“I know,” I said.
Sunday, row six
Bryson found me in the bleachers in under a minute. He said it was the coat.
He didn’t see the cuff until we were at the steak place after, when I reached for the bread. “Mom. What’d you get on your sleeve?”
“Marker,” I said, and he let it go, because he had eleven weeks of things to tell me and only one day to do it.
Elsie and I had parted at the Memphis station. Before she got in her nephew’s car she took the peppermint tin out of her purse and printed on the lid with the black marker, and gave it to me.
DENA. And under that, SUN.
The ride home was Sunday night. Row six, aisle seat. Nobody behind me but a woman doing a crossword with a pen.
Somewhere past Nashville I took a peppermint out of the tin, rolled up my right sleeve so the red streak sat on top, and put my elbow down on the armrest for the rest of the night.
If you’ve ever sat with your arms folded for forty minutes so a stranger could sleep, this one’s yours, and so is the window seat next to Elsie.
Family secrets and painful betrayals surface in the letter that revealed what her son’s father knew and the night she gave her dad her place in Mom’s recliner. And when a family keepsake goes missing, a boy’s dirt bike brings deputies to the door.
