Red River
“Marcus,” Denise said, “I’d like your badge. And your keys. And then I’d like you to wait in the break room until the district manager gets here.”
The tech stared at her. “Are you serious?”
“I’ve never been more serious.”
“Over eleven dollars?”
“Over the way you talked to him.”
He unclipped the badge. His hands weren’t steady. He put it down on the counter next to her glasses, and the plastic made a small click that everyone in line heard.
Nobody said a word.
My name is Carla Alvarez. I’m fifty-one. I’m a dental hygienist in Kansas City, Missouri. Dad is Raymond Alvarez, eighty-four, and he’s the quietest man I know.
He drove the number 14 bus for thirty-one years. Not forty, like I always say. Thirty-one. He started in 1985 and retired in 2016. He wore the same gray jacket for most of it. He had a thermos of coffee and a cassette of Ray Price in the dash.
He never talked about the job. If I asked, he’d say, “People get on. People get off.”
I learned about the flood that day in the pharmacy. Same as everybody else.
I should tell you how Dad ended up there.
My mother, Elena, died in 2019. Cancer. After that, Dad stayed in the little house on Prospect, the one he bought in 1979 for $31,000. He cooks for himself. He walks two miles every morning. He checks his sugar at seven and at six.
His pension is $1,912 a month, from the transit authority. Social Security adds $1,140. It’s enough if nothing goes wrong. Something always does. The furnace. The roof. The insurance plan changed in January, and his insulin copay went from $35 to $75.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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