The Night Bus and the Ukulele

The text came in at half past nine on a Tuesday night, while I was wiping down the espresso machine for the third time because there was genuinely nothing else left to do in that shop, and it said, "PUT ON SHOES YOU CAN RUN IN. NIGHT BUS STOP ON KOVA STREET. 11 PM. RULES TO FOLLOW. BRING NOTHING BUT YOUR WITS AND YOUR WALLET. YOU KNOW ME, I MEAN ALL OF IT."

That was Sofia Doubtfire, all caps, no greeting, no goodbye, and the same woman I had known since we were both twenty-two and broke and sharing a flat above a bakery that smelled like burned sugar every morning of the week. She was fifty-two now, a pharmacist, and she had never in thirty years sent me a text I could ignore, because the woman did not know how to do things halfway and never had.

I stood there with the rag in my hand and read it three times, and I will admit I felt something I had not felt in a while, which was the little tickle in the stomach that means yes, this is stupid, and yes, you are going to do it anyway.

Here is the thing about my life, and I say this with love for my own stupid choices. I own a coffee shop called the Regular Grind, I am fifty-two years old, I open at six and close at four, and I have not done anything unpredictable since I told Nico Paulson no when he asked me to marry him six years ago. I dumped a good man because he was too careful, and then I became the most careful person in the city, which is the kind of joke God tells when he has been drinking.

So I locked up, went home, put on my running shoes like an obedient fool, and texted back, "WHAT ARE THE RULES."

The rules came in a burst, four messages in a row, the way Sofia sends everything, like she is paid by the message. One, meet at the night bus stop on Kova Street at eleven sharp. Two, a list of items would be waiting, one item per stop along Night Bus Line 7, and you collect them as the bus goes. Three, the finish line is the pharmacy, 24h Pharma on the corner of Delt Street, which closes at midnight, and if you are not through the door by midnight you lose. Four, the prize is real and it is sitting in her shop safe right now, and it is the vintage ukulele she has been waving in my face for two years, a Koaloha from the sixties, made of koa wood, worth more than my car.

Then a fifth message that said, "OH AND ONE MORE THING. YOU ARE NOT THE ONLY CONTESTANT. SEE YOU AT ELEVEN," followed by a row of grinning faces, and I sat on my own bed with my shoes already on and felt the bottom drop out of my evening, because Sofia had a look she got when she was up to something, and I could feel that look all the way through the phone.

I got to the stop at five to eleven, and the street was empty in that way streets get late at night, all sodium light and wet pavement and one pigeon doing something unwise near a bin. The schedule taped inside the shelter said Line 7 came through at eleven-oh-five, and I stood there in my running shoes with my wallet in my pocket like someone waiting for the school van, except fifty-two and slightly embarrassed about it.

Then I heard the wheels, and the bus came around the corner with its lights on, and it pulled up and the doors folded open, and standing at the stop sign three feet behind me, having arrived so quietly I never heard him, was Nico Paulson.

Fifty-four years old, taller than me by a head, gray in his beard now where it was brown six years ago, holding his phone in one hand and looking at me like I was a math problem he had not solved yet.

"Jeanine," he said.

"Nico," I said, because there was really nowhere to go with that one.

"Sofia texted you too, then."

"Sofia texted me four hundred messages in a row, which for her is a short note, yes."

He almost laughed at that, and then the driver leaned out of his seat and said, "Folks, I am running a schedule here, not a reunion, so everybody on and find a seat, please."

The driver was a young guy, twenty-nine maybe, with a nametag that said WALT and a ukulele strapped to his back like a rifle, which I did not have the energy to ask about. We got on, Nico first and me after, and the bus was empty except for the three of us and the whole long row of seats glowing under the interior lights, and Walt turned around in his seat and handed each of us a little wooden token shaped like a ukulele, maybe three inches long, with a number stamped on the back. Mine said 1. His said 2.

"What is this for," Nico said, turning his over in those careful hands of his, and I remember thinking, six years and the man still inspects everything before he accepts it.

"Rules say you show the token at each stop to collect your item," Walt said. "Rules also say I am supposed to tell you I do not care who wins, I am not taking sides, and if either of you starts crying on my bus I stop the bus and you both walk. I drive the night line. I have seen enough crying for one lifetime."

"Fair enough," I said, and sat down by the window, and Nico sat down across the aisle from me, which I decided was the polite distance of a man who knows better than to sit next to you before he has been invited, and I noticed that about him the way you notice an old coat in the back of a closet, familiar and slightly wrong.

Walt pulled away from the stop, and the city slid by, all shuttered shops and one kebab place still lit up like a shrine, and I looked at the list Sofia had sent me, the actual list, which had arrived at 11:01 sharp, and it read like the grocery list of a madwoman. One bus transfer ticket, unmarked. A photograph of a stranger taken with their permission. A receipt for something under one euro. A live plant, no bigger than a fist. A story told to you by the driver. A coin from a year that matters to somebody. And the last line was just the word SURPRISE in capital letters, which with Sofia could mean anything from a puppy to a summons.

"Do you understand any of this," I said, holding the phone out across the aisle without thinking, and he took it, and his fingers did not touch mine, and I hated that I had noticed.

"Some of it," he said, reading. "The transfer ticket you buy from the machine at the next stop. The receipt is easy, there is a kiosk. The plant, well, there is a flower box outside the hospital stop if it is still stocked at night. The coin and the photograph, those you have to talk to people, which is the part Sofia knows I am bad at."

"You talked to me for two years," I said, and then wished I had not, because the sentence had come out with a lot more under it than I had loaded into it.

"That was different," he said, quiet, looking at the token in his hand instead of at me. "You were the one person I never had to plan a conversation for."

And there it was, twelve minutes into the evening, the whole reason Sofia had put us on the same bus, laid out flat between the seats like something dropped on the floor. I looked out the window at the empty street and thought about the coffee shop and the espresso machine and the third wipe-down, and I thought, well, Jeanine, you wanted unpredictable, and here it comes down the road at you with its lights on.

Walt cleared his throat from the front without turning around.

"Next stop, Meri Street," he said. "Machine there sells tickets. And per the rules, both of you get off, both of you collect, and both of you get back on, and I leave in ninety seconds whether you are on it or not. Sofia's orders. She also told me to tell you the ukulele does not care who wins."

"The ukulele does not care," I repeated.

"No ma'am. I care, though. That thing is beautiful. I have played a recording of it over the phone."

"You have not," Nico said.

"I have," Walt said, easing the bus toward the stop, "and it was the best five minutes of my month, which tells you about my month."

The bus hissed down onto Meri Street and there was the ticket machine, glowing blue in the dark like an aquarium, and next to it, and I swear Sofia had planned this, there was a twenty-four hour laundromat with all its fluorescents blazing and nobody inside but a woman folding towels and a dryer going around like a slow carousel. "Transfer ticket," I said, reading the list again. "And I am guessing the laundromat is not decorative."

"Sofia does nothing decorative," Nico said, and we both got off, and Walt said something behind us that sounded like a prayer for patience.

The ticket machine took my coins and spat out a transfer slip, unmarked, exactly as advertised, and I slid it into my jacket pocket and turned around and Nico was already standing in the doorway of the laundromat reading the second half of the clue off his phone. "A single red sock," he said. "It says a single red sock, washed and dried, still warm."

"Still warm," I said. "She wants a warm sock. She has lost her mind entirely."

"She has always been like this," Nico said, and then he caught himself, because of course he knew Sofia too, back then, and I watched him decide not to apologize for knowing her, which was correct of him, and I appreciated it and hated appreciating it.

Inside, the woman with the towels looked up and said her name was Maritta and she had been told to expect us, both of us, and that there was a basket of socks on the counter and one of them was red and the rest was a problem we would have to solve ourselves, and she went back to her towels as a woman closes a door. The basket had maybe forty socks in it and exactly one red one, buried, and we both saw it at the same time, and I want to tell you I acted like a gracious fifty-two-year-old woman, but I did not, I lunged, and I got my fingers on it, and then it slipped, because my hands were sweating, which they never do, and it dropped onto the floor by the dryers and Nico bent down and picked it up before I could get there.

He stood there holding it, this tall careful man with gray in his beard, holding one red sock like it was evidence in a trial, and he said, "The rules say the token holder collects the item, it does not say anything about who finds it."

"I found it," I said.

"You dropped it," he said, not mean, just factual, which was always his way, facts laid out flat like laundry. "Thank you for the play by play." He looked at the sock and then at me and said, "We could share the point. Sofia's rules do not say the items are exclusive, I read them twice on the way over. Both tokens, one sock, she has to count it or explain why not."

"You read the rules twice."

"Three times," he said. "I was nervous."

That stopped me, I will admit it, a fifty-four-year-old data engineer standing in a laundromat at midnight-adjacent telling me he read the contest rules three times because he was nervous, and Maritta over by the towels made a small noise that might have been a laugh swallowed for professional reasons. "Fine," I said. "Share the point. But I am holding the sock, because you will fold it into quarters and file it somewhere and it will never be warm again."

"That is fair," he said, and handed it over, and it was still warm from the dryer, actually warm, and Sofia's stupid little detail worked on me the way she meant it to, some soft animal thing about warmth, and I stuffed it in my pocket next to the transfer ticket and did not say thank you because I was busy not saying several things.

Walt honked once from the bus, a short polite honk, a man counting down from thirty, and we got back on and sat in our same seats, the polite distance, and the bus rolled on toward the kiosk stop, and I looked at the sock in my pocket and thought about how Nico used to fold my clothes when we were together, how he did it in quarters like library documents, and how I had told him once it made me feel like a filing cabinet, and how his face had done something complicated at that, and how I had left him six months later anyway, because I said he was too cautious, and the true version, the version I only admitted at four in the morning sometimes when the shop was quiet, was that he was too cautious and I was too scared, and I gave one of those a fancy name and blamed the other one.

"Next stop, Talvi Street," Walt called back. "Kiosk is open till two. Receipt under one euro, gum, postcard, whatever Sofia's list says, and I leave in ninety seconds, and I mean it, I have left people in ninety seconds before and I will do it again."

"You have not," I said.

"I left my old roommate in Turku once," Walt said, "but that was personal."

The kiosk was one of those old glass boxes lit up yellow, run by a man named Petri who was doing a crossword and did not look up until Nico put money on the counter, and the list said a pack of gum and a postcard, and I heard Nico ask for the gum, mint, the same kind he always chewed, and I did not say anything about remembering that. While Petri rang it up I looked at the postcard rack, all tourist stuff, the harbor, the cathedral, the big ugly statue by the ferry terminal, and then at the bottom there was one card with a painting on it, some local artist's idea of a night market, all smudged oranges and string lights, and my hand stopped on it before my brain caught up, because we had gone to a night market like that, six years back, in another city, on the trip where he was going