GGP & Little Joey

Phillip Chapman had been sitting on the bench outside the Oak Creek Bus Terminal for fifty-five minutes, and he still had five to go before it would even count as being merely early rather than desperate.

The morning was cool for June, the kind of Maine morning that smelled like cut grass and diesel fuel and the faint salt tang that drifted up from the coast when the wind turned right. Phillip adjusted his suspenders for what felt like the tenth time, though there was nothing wrong with them. His hands just needed something to do besides sit folded in his lap like a pair of old gloves nobody wanted anymore.

He'd left the house at half past six for a bus that wasn't due until half past eight. He told himself it was because you never could trust the schedule out here, that a coach could roll in ten minutes early on a good traffic day and he wasn't about to have his great-grandson step off into an empty terminal looking for a face that wasn't there. That was the reason he gave himself, and it was even partly true. But the whole truth of it sat heavier than that, and Phillip knew it the way he knew his own knees ached before a rainstorm.

The truth was that the house had gotten to be more than he could stand this morning. He'd woken up at five, same as always now, reaching over out of habit before his mind caught up with the rest of him. The sheets on Mary's side were cool and smooth and had been for a month, and every morning that little fact managed to surprise him fresh, like a splinter he kept forgetting was under his skin until he pressed on it again. He'd made his coffee in the quiet kitchen, and the quiet had pressed in on him from every corner of the room until he couldn't sit at that table one more minute. So he'd grabbed his keys and gone, and here he was, an hour early at a terminal with a cracked concrete curb and a single bench, waiting for the one thing all month that felt like it might actually be worth waking up for.

He watched the traffic light at the corner change from red to green and back again three separate times. A gull wheeled overhead and complained loudly about something only gulls understood. Phillip checked his watch, an old windup Mary had given him for their twentieth anniversary, and found that only two minutes had passed since the last time he'd checked it.

"Come on, now," he murmured to nobody. "Don't you fret none. He'll be along."

At eight twenty-six, the big silver coach came rumbling around the bend off Route 9, its brakes hissing as it eased into the terminal bay. Phillip was on his feet before it had even come to a full stop, his heart doing something in his chest that hadn't happened in weeks, something closer to hope than to the dull ache he'd grown so used to carrying.

The doors folded open with a pneumatic sigh, and a broad-shouldered man in a crisp navy uniform shirt stepped down first, thick mustache and all, sweeping his eyes over the platform before he turned back toward the bus. This was Thaddeus Vanderbilt, and Phillip recognized him from the description Sharon had given over the phone three separate times, as if repeating it might make the man more trustworthy. "Right on schedule," Thaddeus called out, his voice a deep rumble that seemed to come up from somewhere in his boots. He held one hand up toward the bus doorway. "Watch your step, son. That's it."

And there he was.

Joey came down the steps two at a time, his faded blue backpack riding high on his shoulders and his worn basketball tucked under one wiry arm like it had grown there. His sandy hair stuck up in its usual cowlick, and his hazel eyes went scanning across the platform, quick and searching, until they landed square on Phillip and lit up like the Fourth of July.

"GGP!" Joey hollered, loud enough that a woman waiting for a different bus turned to look. He dropped his basketball, let it bounce twice on the concrete, and didn't even care, just took off running with his arms already spreading wide. He hit Phillip somewhere around the waist and wrapped both arms clean around him, squeezing with the kind of force only an eight-year-old boy seemed able to produce.

"I'm here for summer vacation!" Joey announced into Phillip's shirt front. "And I'm gonna catch a whole bucket of river bass, you just wait and see!"

Phillip laughed. It came out rusty, like a hinge that hadn't been used in some time, but it was real, and it was the first one he'd managed since the funeral. He set a spotted, calloused hand on top of that unruly hair and held it there a moment longer than was probably necessary.

"Well now," Phillip said, his voice thick. "Look at you. Grew a whole inch since Christmas, I'd wager."

"Two inches," Joey corrected, pulling back just far enough to grin up at him. "Mom measured. Hey, did you know why the fisherman brought a ladder onto the boat?"

Phillip blinked. "Can't say that I do."

"Because he wanted to catch fish at the highest level!" Joey burst into giggles at his own joke, doubling over slightly with the effort of it, and Phillip found himself chuckling right along even though the joke made no real sense at all.

Thaddeus had come around to the luggage bay by then, hauling out a small duffel bag with Joey's name written on masking tape across the side in Sharon's careful handwriting. He set it down and gave Phillip a nod, the kind of nod one careful man gives another when a job has been done right.

"Sat right behind my seat the whole way, sir," Thaddeus said. "Didn't cause a lick of trouble. Told me three different knock-knock jokes and asked if I'd ever hit a moose." "Had he?" Phillip asked, genuinely curious now. "Twice," Thaddeus said gravely, and something in the set of his mustache suggested he wasn't joking. "Neither one was pleasant for the moose or the bus."

Phillip reached out and shook the man's broad hand. "Much obliged to you. His mother will rest easier knowing you looked after him."

"Only doing what any decent man would do," Thaddeus said, and touched two fingers to his cap before climbing back up into the bus to check his schedule.

Joey had already retrieved his basketball from where it had rolled against the curb and was hugging it to his chest along with his backpack straps. "I got a whole list of jokes, GGP," he said, trotting alongside Phillip toward the sedan parked at the edge of the lot. "I wrote 'em on a piece of paper and everything, so I wouldn't forget. Mom said I should call her the second I got here so she doesn't worry."

"We'll call her before we do another thing," Phillip promised, popping the trunk and setting the duffel bag inside with careful hands. "Your mother worries enough for the whole state of Maine."

"That's what Dad says too," Joey said, climbing into the passenger seat and buckling himself in without being asked, basketball wedged safely between his sneakers. He looked up at Phillip with those wide hazel eyes, solemn now for just a moment beneath all that bounce. "I'm really glad I'm here, GGP."

Phillip stood there at the open car door a second longer than he needed to, looking at that small, eager face, and felt something loosen in his chest that had been knotted tight for a month.

"So am I, Joey," he said quietly. "So am I."