Night at the Fiestas: Stories by Kirstin Valdez Quade Page A

baby on the bus?”
    Frances tamped down a surge of irritation, closed her book, and gave her father a tight, tolerant smile in the mirror. “You have.”
    Of course he had. Twice a day for twenty years he’d driven the same dusty two hundred miles between Raton and Santa Fe, never even stepping off his bus to walk down the faded main streets of the towns he passed through. Every single day, the landscape changing in the same ways: deepening or rippling, shading greener here, flatter there, from high plain to chaparral to woodland plateau and back again, the vistas unbroken except for the occasional herd of antelope or deer or, more rarely, elk. Of course he’d told her about the baby.
    “You’re kidding,” said the crocheting woman. “Blessed be.”
    “Yep,” her father said with enthusiasm. “She gathered up all her packages and boxes, but left the baby.”
    He told it again, how another passenger had discovered the baby fast asleep on the seat when they were only a few miles outside of Maxwell, how he’d slowed the bus, made an excruciating many-pointed turn on the empty blacktop highway, and drove back to the depot in town. They found the woman without much trouble; it was a small town, and the man behind the ticket counter pointed her out, sitting on a bench outside the station, surrounded by her luggage.
    Frances could understand wanting to abandon a baby; the mystery was why the woman had only left it on a bus and not in the boondocks where no one would find it. Frances babysat, but just because there were things she needed: beautiful, transformative clothes, a typewriter, a powder-blue valise. Above all, Frances needed to get out of Raton for good. She wanted to go to college, to take her place among the fresh-faced young men and women at UNM, skirt swinging and books clutched to her chest, her face raised to the warm possibility of romance. This weekend was practice for the day when she would board this bus again and never return.
    “My God,” said the woman. “She must have been out of her head with worry.”
    “Claimed it was a mistake and practically tore that baby from my arms. But I’m not sure she convinced me, wasn’t crying or anything. Who’s to say she didn’t pull the same stunt on some other guy’s route?” Still, the story had a happy ending: “All that, and we arrived in Santa Fe only nine minutes behind schedule.”
    It was an excellent story made stupid by his telling: for instance, when he’d told it the first time at dinner, it was the turn that had seemed to interest him most; he’d demonstrated on the tablecloth using his knife as the bus.
    Frances looked at her father in the driver’s seat—his round, sloping shoulders, the stubble on the back of his neck. He held the big wheel with both hands as if it were a roasting pan. He used to be a frustrated man, a shouter and a spanker. But he’d mellowed as Frances got older. Now he sought her company with a sort of sodden sentimentality that left her at once touched and galled.
    “Shame I can’t go with you,” her father called. “To the Fiestas. It would be nice to see Lillian, spend some time with you girls.”
    Frances kept her eyes on her book, pretending not to have heard. The swell of power this gave her was like an electric charge.
    “Would you look at that,” he tried again, sweeping his hand across the windshield. “You don’t get views like these from an office, Francy.”
    “Daddy, I have to do some reading. For school.” She held her book up to the mirror and sighed dramatically. “I’ll just move back. You two enjoy your conversation.”
    “Smart as a whip, my girl,” her father told the crocheting woman, but Frances could hear the hurt in his voice.
    She stood, lifted down her bag, and as she did, her dress ripped at the armpit. From her new seat she examined the tear. “Goddamn it,” she muttered, digging in her swimming bag for her cardigan. Up front, her father had fallen silent, his shoulders