My Blind Date Whispered, I’m Sorry I’m Not What You Expected… And My Answer Made Her Cry – Part 1

Hey, my name is Hank Bishop. I’m a 56 years old and I drive a school bus in a little town called Marlow, Ohio, Route 7, the long one out past the grain elevator in the county road where the houses get farther apart. I’ve been driving that route 9 years. I know every kid on it by name, which ones get carsick if they sit in the back, which ones are going home to a warm kitchen and which ones aren’t.

It’s not much of a job in the way the world measures jobs, but I’ll tell you, there is something steadying about being the same face at the same time every morning for a kid whose life doesn’t have a lot of same in it. The evening this story starts, a woman sat across from me at a diner, looked down at the table and apologized for not being what I expected, and I gave her an answer that made her cry.

And to understand why, you have to know that I was the last man in Ohio who had any business expecting anything. It was a blind date, my first one in longer than I want to admit. My buddy Earl, who drives Route 4 and has appointed himself in charge of my personal life, set the whole thing up.

He’d been after me for 2 years, ever since I told him I’d given up on that part of life for good. “You’re not dead, Hank.” He kept saying, “You just act like it.” And he wore me down, the way a man will, until one Thursday evening I found myself sitting in a booth at the Bluebird Diner on Main Street in a shirt I’d ironed badly, feeling like a fool, waiting for a woman named Faye that I’d never met.

And when she came in, a little late, a little flushed from the cold, and slid into the booth across from me, the first thing she did, before hello, before anything, was look down at her own hands on the table and say, very quietly, in a voice that had clearly rehearsed it, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I’m not what you expected.

I know Earl probably built me up. I’m just a 53-year-old lunch lady with bad knees and a lot of miles on me. And if you want to cut this short, I understand. I won’t be hurt. I’m used to it.” Let me back up because you have to understand the shape my life was in for any of this to land the way it did. My wife was named Marie. We were 31 years and she was the warm center of everything. The kind of woman who made a house feel like the inside of a hug.

We had one daughter, Laney, the light of both our lives and then over the space of about four years, I lost nearly all of it. Marie went first, six years back, cancer, slow and cruel and I learned what it is to watch the center of your life go out like a lamp. I thought that was the worst thing that would ever happen to me.

I was wrong about that because two years ago I lost Laney, too. My girl was driving home from her shift at the hospital on a wet November night when a man who’d had too much to drink crossed the center line and hit her head on. She was 30 years old. She died before the ambulance got there on the side of a county road not 10 miles from the route I drive every morning.

And she left behind a little boy, her son, my grandson, Charlie. Charlie was six when his mother died. He’s eight now. His father, a man named Derek Hodge, had been gone since Charlie was barely two, just walked out one day and didn’t come back, never paid a dime, never sent a birthday card, never once called to hear his son’s voice.

Laney raised that boy alone, working doubles at the hospital and she did a beautiful job of it. And when she died, there was never any question in my mind about what came next. I went down to the county and I did the paperwork and I became Charlie’s legal guardian and that little boy came to live with me in the house where I’d raised his mother.

And the two of us, a broken-down old bus driver and a little boy with a hole in his heart the exact size and shape of his mom set about the business of raising each other. So, that’s who was sitting in that booth at the Bluebird. Not some eligible bachelor, a 56-year-old widower who’d buried his wife and his only child, who drove a school bus for not much money, who was raising an 8-year-old on a fixed income and a lot of prayer, and who had, just like the woman across from me, stopped expecting good things a long time ago

because every time he’d let himself hope life had taken something else away. So, when Fay Dunbar looked down at the table and apologized for not being what I expected I didn’t reassure her the way you’re supposed to. I didn’t tell her she was being silly or that she looked just fine or any of the things a man says. I told her the truth.

“Fay,” I said, “can I be honest with you? Because I think we’d both do better with honest than with the usual.” She looked up, wary. “All right. Here’s the thing about what I expected,” I said, “I didn’t expect anything. I stopped expecting anything good a long time ago. I’m a 56-year-old man who drives a school bus.

I buried my wife 6 years ago and my daughter 2 years ago, and I’m raising my grandson because his daddy ran off and his mom is in the ground. I ironed this shirt badly because I haven’t had a reason to iron a shirt in years. I almost didn’t come tonight because I figured what does a man like me have to offer anybody?” I looked at her steady.

“So, when you sit down and tell me you’re sorry you’re not what I expected, all I can think is, ‘Lady, you’ve got it backwards. I’m the one who’s not what anybody would expect. We’re two people the world already decided we’re past it. And you want to know the honest truth? Sitting here across from somebody who knows exactly what that feels like, who stopped expecting, too, is the first time in about 6 years I haven’t felt completely alone in it.

” And that was the thing that made Fay Dunbar cry. Not big crying, just her eyes filling up and her pressing her lips together and one tear getting away from her and running down before she could catch it because I hadn’t pitied her. I hadn’t flattered her. I’d done the one thing nobody had done for either of us in a long time, which was sit down in the wreckage right next to her and say, “Me, too.

I know. You’re not alone in this.” “I came here ready to be let down easy,” she said, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand, half laughing at herself. “I had the whole thing planned. Give him the out before he takes it. I’ve been doing that for years.” “I know that move,” I said. “I invented half of it.

” She laughed for real then, and something in her face came loose, some clenched and guarded thing, and across that sticky diner table two tired, written-off people looked at each other and recognized something, the way you recognize a face from your hometown in a crowd a thousand miles away. It was the best evening I’d had since before Marie got sick.

Faye Dunbar, it turned out, was the lunch lady at Marlo Elementary, which meant, though neither of us had quite put it together, that she’d been feeding my grandson hot lunch five days a week for two years. She knew Charlie. Her whole face lit up when she made the connection. “Charlie Bishop is your grandson? Oh, Hank, that boy.

He always says thank you. Every single day, real quiet, like he means it. You don’t know how rare that is in a lunch line.” And I felt something catch in my throat because that was Laney in him, that quiet politeness, and here was a stranger who’d been seeing it and treasuring it without even knowing whose it was. “He’s got a thing he does,” I told her before I could stop myself because something about Faye made a man want to talk.

Every night before bed he tells me one good thing that happened and one hard thing. His mama started it with him when she was alive. The good thing and the hard thing. So I kept it up because it was hers.” I turned my coffee cup around on the table. “Some nights the hard thing breaks your heart clean in two, but he always finds a good thing.

Every single night that boy finds one. I don’t know where he gets it. Faye was quiet for a second and then she said soft, He gets it from you, I expect. A man doesn’t keep doing his dead daughter’s bedtime ritual every night for 2 years unless he’s the kind of person who knows how to find the good thing in the hard thing. She looked at me.

So, what’s your good thing today, Hank? And I’ll be honest, the question caught me sideways because nobody had asked me that in 2 years. I was always the one asking. I sat there a second and then I looked at this woman across the table, this lunch lady with the bad knees and the kind eyes who’d apologized for existing an hour ago and I said, Honestly, it’s this, right here.

This is my good thing today. And Faye Dunbar looked down at the table again, but it was a different kind of looking down this time. Not the braced for rejection kind, just a woman trying to hold something tender without spilling it. She’d had her own hard road. Married young to a man who turned out to drink, divorced by 35, raised two kids of her own who were grown now and moved away to cities that didn’t have time for a lunch lady mother.

She’d been alone a long time. She’d convinced herself, the way you do, that the alone was permanent. That at her age and in her circumstances, the romance part of life was a closed door. Men my age want women half my age, she said without bitterness, just stating the weather. And men who’d want a woman my age are looking for somebody without my mileage.

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