She filled the aisle seat as full as could be. With the bus being at capacity, that meant she had a trapped audience in the window seat. He was a young man — younger than my 35 years then — and was dressed neatly enough. I sat by the window across from them; your grandma dozed on and off next to me. We were headed home after going to a funeral on her side of the family.

After the first two minutes the young man across the way didn’t so much as grunt to encourage the woman to keep talking or to make her think he was listening. He closed his eyes for a while, either trying to feign or attain sleep. She didn’t mind at all and he gave up on that and stared out the window.

An hour and a half of this on a hot day in the old bus wore mightily on that young man’s nerves. Truth be told, I was wishing she’d run out of steam, but I knew I had it better than he did.

The driver pulled off the dirt road and up to a bus stop. The young man stood up and interrupted the torrent of tales from his seatmate. “Excuse me,” he said, a bit sharply.

“Oh, is this your stop?” the talker inquired.

“It is now,” he said, and he strode almost the whole aisle to the front of the bus and stepped off behind a married couple about his age. I could see them eyeing him closely, wondering why he was following them.

The little town behind the bus stop looked like all the other little towns on the route in those Depression days. There were maybe a thousand souls calling it home and they’d done nothing to differentiate themselves from the little towns around them.

I saw the young fellow breathe a sigh of relief at his escape. Anywhere, he obviously felt, had to be better than next to that mouth on the bus.

The doors closed and the bus started to pull away. I turned in my seat and gave the escapee a last look. He didn’t look so happy now; in fact, he looked downright scared. I looked in our direction of travel to see if I could spot what had so quickly curtailed his enjoyment of freedom.

As I said, this place, wherever it was, was like all the other little towns on the route. Each of them had the same big sign: “NIGGER — Don’t Let The Sun Set On You In This Town!” To press the point, there was a crude painting of a black man hanging from a tree.

I knew that this was the only bus stopping there that day. And I knew there was no point in trying to get the driver to stop and let that young man back on.  He wouldn’t have done it even if I had been a white man asking.

A long couple of hours later, we arrived in the city and the driver pulled up under the bright streetlights at the station. Your grandma and I got off the bus, leaving behind that yakkity woman who was still yammering at the empty seat next to her.

And that, Grandchildren, is a story about what it was like to live back then. Remember — you asked.

She was very careful about that. It mattered. Each mark was a compromise she and Mason had agreed upon. Too big and not enough marks would fit on the board; too small, and too many marks would fit. She had practiced with the marker until she could neatly fill the board with one hundred marks, in tallies of fives.

She looked over at Mason and watched. Then she made the five-bar gate to signify the fifth attempt of that set.

“That’s fifty,” she said, more distinctly than was absolutely necessary.

Mason frowned and nodded. Then he made himself smile as he got back in his chair.

“That was a good morning’s workout,” he claimed. “Lunch, a little rest, and we’ll be ready for the blue pen this afternoon.”

Natalie also forced a smile and nodded at him.

Mason looked at the German shepherd sitting by the door; the dog was leashed, and the hand loop was hooked over the doorknob. That kept Schultz from running to his master’s side during the counting process.

“Ready to go out, Schultz?” Mason asked. The dog’s face brightened, and Mason rolled his wheelchair around the soft mats he had fallen on fifty times that morning. He took hold of the leash and opened the door. Schultz, mindful of his master’s needs, slowly led Mason through the doorway and outside.

Natalie walked around the mats and closed the door behind them. She told herself not to sigh but did so anyway.

Fifty times Mason had fallen this morning. And it was almost a given he would fall fifty times this afternoon as she filled the rest of the whiteboard with blue marks. Then he would stop for the day.

They had begun to work it out just before he left the hospital.

“Mason, it would be a miracle if you ever walked again. How many times are you willing to fall in one day to try for that miracle?”

“I’m willing to fall a thousand times a day to make that first step on my own.”

“I’m not willing to watch you fall a thousand times a day,” she had told him.

They had compromised on one hundred.

Just fifty to go, in the middle of the afternoon, and they could both call it a day.

Jeremy Broadmanor, Millicent’s nephew, sighed. He had been expecting this. “Gentlemen, your assistance, please.”

The pallbearers carrying the coffin of Jeremy’s father, Frederick, set their burden down and took up the handles of Millicent’s coffin. Jeremy led the way into the crypt.

“Aunt Millicent,” he said, “this is the third time in the past year you have done this. First when we brought cousin Arnold here. Then, eight months later when poor little Theodore died of the measles. And now again as we bring your dear brother to his final rest. It’s just too bad of you, Aunt Millicent, to play this game at such times.”

He shook his head as he looked at the empty space next to the coffin of his other late aunt, Marvela, Millicent and Frederick’s elder sister. He silently directed the pallbearers to place Millicent’s coffin against a wall on the far side of the crypt, then nodded that they should bring his father down.

“I am very sorry, Aunt Millicent,” Jeremy said to the coffin, “but this is as good as it gets. You are as far from Aunt Marvela as it is possible to be in here. You are part of the family and here you will remain. Surely a lifelong feud was enough; you don’t have to carry it on after your deaths, as well.”

The pallbearers returned and placed Frederick next to Millicent, blocking her in her new resting place. Frederick had always tried to make peace between the sisters.

“Thank you, Father, and good luck,” he said.

As Jeremy trod the steps upward, he heard a small noise. He pondered for years afterward whether it was a final huff from his Aunt Millicent or a sigh of relief from someone else entombed there.

Ronnie sighed, which irritated Clay afresh.

The only breeze came down the short hallway from the other side of the house. It was warm and wet, but it was the only moving air they had. It brought the scent of garbage from the kitchen, and they wrinkled their noses in disgust with each new feeble waft.

They wanted to blame each other for that but it was pointless. The garbage can outside the back door was full and fermenting with the lid tied on to keep the roving packs of dogs out of it. Two nights ago, some dogs had tipped the can over and tried to scratch their way inside. When that failed, they turned on each other, filling the night with sounds of primal anger and pain.

Clay moved his eyes to see Ronnie’s pregnant belly, huge and white in the moonlight. Like his, her breaths were shallow, and the hump barely moved. He silently cursed her for getting pregnant, and the heat helped him to overlook his own contribution to her condition. The two of them were barely making it on the irregular government handouts; there was never any telling when the next truck would come by. Another mouth to feed would make things worse.

It would be better if the child were never born, he thought. Hell, it would be better for Ronnie if she didn’t have to live through any of this, let alone another human life in this mad world.

There were no stairs to push her down. He couldn’t easily drown her; there wasn’t much water, and even when the power to the pump was turned on he couldn’t hoard enough. The government truck didn’t bring bullets, and he needed what few he had in case the mad dogs or some lunatic or — Clay’s special nightmare — one of those enormous, mutated snakes got inside the house.

Clay knew he didn’t want Ronnie to suffer as he killed her. She was the best thing ever to happen in his life, and he had to take that into account. So how to…

He chuckled. It was a feeble sound, but Ronnie heard him.

“What could possibly be funny?” she whispered.

“I was thinking of how to kill you gently to put you out of your misery.”

She let that hang between them for a moment, in the thick air.

“You’ve always been too good to me, Clay,” she finally said. “Always thinking of my happiness.”

Then they both laughed, ever so briefly. Their hands touched and they suffered the extra heat for the tenderness.

They did not sleep. They dozed fitfully in the thick, stinking atmosphere of their home. But for the rest of the hot night, it was good enough.

“They don’t look half bad there,” said Kris’s father.

“No, they don’t,” Kris’s friend Darren agreed.

“I was skeptical, but they work,” Kris’s grandfather said.

“I still don’t think they’re appropriate,” Kris’s mother said. “But I’m not going to argue the point. I suppose they’re not hurting anything, either.”

“I think they’re appropriate,” Kris’s little sister said quietly.

They finally turned away and walked down the little aisle. A man in a dark suit smiled gravely at them and nodded a good night; they would all be back in the morning.

The big green fuzzy dice — which alone had survived the wreck — swung a little as the man closed the casket, and they came to rest on Kris’s chest.