The bus broke down outside Moline. Extra three hours in a depot that smelled of old coffee and wet wool.
I was going home for the funeral. My brother—eleven years older, the one who taught me to gut a fish—was gone.
I sat there counting ceiling tiles like I count salmon at the hatchery. A kid, maybe nine, sat across from me. He asked why I was crying.
Adults wouldn't ask that. They'd look away and call it private.
I told him the truth: my brother died. He reached into his backpack and pulled out a bookmark. From a bookstore that closed when he was a baby, he said. His mom had it laminated.
‘You can hold it,’ he said. ‘It helps to hold something.’
I still have that bookmark. It sits in the glovebox of my truck, between farm roads that all look the same.
A stranger's kindness on a five-hour layover. Sometimes that's how you learn to feel again.