“I’m sorry,” said Alice, scooping up Doobie. “I’m going to need the space.”

“But the bus,” said Crystal. “We have to get the bus fixed. It won’t run.”

“It will roll.” Alice shoved an armful of quilts into the bus and quickly slammed the double doors before they swelled against them. Jeremy scampered into the passenger side, and Crystal crawled into the driver’s seat, still trying to say things. Alice dumped Doobie into Jeremy’s lap and slammed the door. There was that good old Volkswagen snap.

“Put it in neutral!” Alice called out, and she got behind the bus and pushed. The yard was level, and it took some doing to get it shoved out of the dents the tires had mashed in the ground and over the raised edge of grass at the street, but there was a gentle slope down toward Miss Gatey’s house, and soon it was rolling on its own. At the first intersection Alice heard a uunnhh-uuhhnn sound, then a ragged catch and a roar. A belch of smoke drifted up Stegall Street, and the bus was gone.

Alice put her nightgown on, got in her bed, and thought about housecleaning. How she would scrub that spare room! She made a list in her mind of what all she would need: a new string mop, a bottle of Murphy Oil Soap. She wouldn’t need that big bed anymore. It was trash day; she would drag the mattress out to the curb. She didn’t think about the past or the future. She just thought about that very morning, and how before the sun got on them she would polish the windows in the spare room with newspapers and ammonia.

Almost Gone

“AND NOW I’M going to put in just a liii-ttle bit of cobalt blue right here,” said Bob Rigsby, dabbling in his watercolors, and in the angled mirror above his painting table they saw the back of his freckled hand make several little dashes at the paper with the brush, then steady; and then the blue leaked out the tip of the brush, spread across the paper, and soaked gratefully into the oval of rose madder still wet from the last stroke. There was an audible gasp, for there in the mirror, to everyone’s amazement, was the side of a rose—the delicate pink of its petal’s edge, the shadowed curve, and the pale bulge at the base of the bloom.

Bob Rigsby looked up and stretched his back. He had a friendly, likable face and a shining bald head, its little feeble hairs now illuminated in the bright light like a glowing halo. “You have to paint what you see, not what you think you see,” he said, smiling at several of the old ladies on the front row.