I gave my rideshare driver coffee every night. One night he drove right past my little house on Cedar Street in Medford, Oregon, and said, “We need to talk somewhere safe.”
The life insurance from my husband’s policy had barely covered the funeral expenses. After forty-two years of marriage, I suddenly found myself alone in our small house in Medford, in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, trying to stretch a retired teacher’s pension that felt impossibly thin. I was sixty-three years old, and for the first time since I was twenty, I needed to find a job.
That’s how I ended up working the evening shift at Riverside Medical Center three nights a week in the billing department. It wasn’t glamorous, but it kept me busy. It kept my mind from drifting to the empty chair at the dinner table.
My shift ended at 11:30 p.m. I’d catch the last city bus home and usually walk through my front door just after midnight.
Then the bus schedule changed that September. Budget cuts, they said. The last bus now left at 11:00 p.m.—a full half hour before my shift ended. I couldn’t afford to leave early and lose those hours, so I did what I had to do.
I started using a rideshare app my daughter had installed on my phone.
That’s how I met Raymond.
The first time his silver Toyota pulled up to the hospital’s staff entrance, I almost didn’t get in. He looked to be in his late fifties, gray threading through his dark hair, deep lines carved around his eyes. But his rating was a perfect five stars, and it was nearly midnight in a poorly lit parking lot in a midsize American city. So I climbed into the back seat and gave him my address on Cedar Street.
“Long shift?” he asked, his voice kind but tired.
“Every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday,” I replied, watching the familiar Medford streets slide past the window.
“How long have you been driving?” I asked.
“About three years now,” he said. “Lost my job at the timber mill when it closed. This keeps me afloat.”
Something in his voice made me look up—really look at him in the rearview mirror. He wore the same worn, wary expression I saw in my own reflection. The look of someone life had knocked down but who kept getting back up because there wasn’t any real choice.
“I’m sorry,” I said, and I meant it.
He glanced at me in the mirror, surprise flickering across his face.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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