Bus Story: Peggy
This morning, dressed in a bright green sports shirt and black shorts Peggy from Austin, Texas energetically shoved a blue transfer in my face.
"Want this?" she asked. "I wish he would've told me I didn't need this before I paid for it. If I were back in Texas, they would've said something, but not here. Not in LA. So, you want it?"
Despite the athletic wear, she was leaning on an aluminum medical issue walking cane. Peggy looked like a woman who spent a lot of time outdoors, her wild hair curling around her tanned face. She looked to be around fifty or fifty-five. I accepted her offer and took the transfer out of her hand.
"Thanks," I said. "I'll use it to get home tonight."
"I'm visiting a friend," she said. "She's at UCLA. It's not good. Not good. She can't talk, she had surgery…” Peggy gestured to her neck showing me where her friend's throat was operated on.
"They found a growth here and one near her heart, too." She tapped her chest. "I had to get out for a minute. Just for a little while. But I'm not sure I should. So, I'm not going far but I had to get some air."
I nodded sympathetically. The rapid-fire speed with which Peggy talked and the agitated way she rocked in her seat made me think she was just barely holding it together.
"How do you know her?" I asked.
"I've known her since the eighth grade. We're from Austin. She doesn't have anyone. Her son is autistic and lives in Vegas with her ex. Her parents are dead. She has no one. So, when I heard she was sick I came to be with her. I'm all she has."
"Is there a chance she'll recover?" I asked. Peggy shook her head.
"No," she said. "But I'll be here for her. As long as it takes."
Peggy popped out of her chair calling to the driver not to let her miss her stop. She'd missed it the last time she rode the 1 and didn't have time to find her way around because she only had a little while before she had to be back.
As she inched her way to the front of the moving bus, I stopped her.
"She's lucky to have a friend like you."
It wasn't nearly enough to help her with what she was going through.
I wish I could say that there was an elegant ending to this, but there wasn't. It was a few more minutes until she got to her stop, so she waited next to the driver as folks squeezed onto the bus around her. Watching Peggy as she gripped the pole in one hand, her cane in the other, I hoped she'd find the right street, and got a few minutes to herself to breathe.
More importantly, I really hope she got her chance to regroup, and that she'd make it back in time to say goodbye.