The bench
Dad drove me in his work truck. We were forty minutes early, because my father is always forty minutes early, to everything, including his own heart surgery years later. I couldn’t stand the thought of the waiting room, so I told him I’d sit outside for a while. He parked across the street and stayed in the truck with the radio on low.
There was a bench on the sidewalk outside the building, next to a bus stop. I sat on my hands so they’d stop shaking.
That’s when the little girl came.
She was maybe two, in red rain boots on a day with no rain, running in that wobbly, full-speed way toddlers run, laughing, away from her mother. Her mother was half a block back, trying to fold a stroller with one hand and hold a diaper bag with the other. The girl wasn’t looking where she was going. She ran straight into my shins, bounced off, and sat down hard on the concrete.
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She scooped up her daughter and said thank you about five times. Then she looked at me, really looked, and said, “You’re going to be an amazing mom someday. You just are. I can tell.”
She had no idea where I was sitting or why. She was a tired woman being kind to a stranger. She buckled her daughter into the stroller, and they went around the corner, and I never learned her name.
I sat on that bench until my appointment time came and went.
