Lisa Thornton- Creative Nonfiction

I Learned to Count at Seventeen

New Hampshire is 1,000 miles from Illinois. Thirty-five years ago, a Greyhound bus ticket cost $20. Two years is long enough for a dad to be divorced and forget how to make decisions for his kid. One and a half is how many packs of Marlboro Lights seventeen-year-old me smoked in the three days it took to cross five states. Four is how many giant, gelled triangles jutted up from the mohawk of the dude in the black leather jacket and back-of-the-hand tattoos wandering the bus terminal in Cleveland, Ohio.  

My grandfather had suffered two strokes. My mother and both of my uncles would be there. Each of their wives would be with them. None of my cousins would be old enough to attend. Fifty-four is how many years my grandparents were married. Eighteen is how many years my grandmother would live without him. Eight is the number on a scale from one to ten of how angry my mother was at my father when she finally picked me up at the station in Boston for the drive up to Claremont, having bitten all ten of her fingernails to the quick. 

Three is how many days my grandfather spoke words that made no sense from his hospital bed, zero is how many of us understood his babbling. Two is the number of doctors who told us he was gone. 

There is one wire fence that runs through Pennsylvania and upstate New York along Interstate 90. There is one woman in the world somewhere who brought a box turtle onto a Greyhound bus when she was little and let it waddle up the aisle on four stout legs in the middle of the night. One college student sat with me on the green plastic seat where I clutched my handbag to my chest. She asked me about my cheating boyfriend, my two times having sex just to keep him, my 412 dreams for the future that did not include him. There is one man who picked up his girlfriend from a Greyhound station in Springfield, Massachusetts and twirled her around ten times in his arms while teenaged me watched from my window seat. Ten twirls lodged into my two-ventricle heart. 

Three is what time it was when my grandmother recognized something in my grandfather’s babbling. A dog running through an empty lot, from that time they went shopping in Keene. One memory in a list of 54 years of memories that he was experiencing all over again. Infinite is the number of times she squeezed his hand while sitting next to his bed listening to him rewind their life to remind him that she was there before he left. 

Love was the thing I learned on that trip because I saw it in my grandparents and in the woman whose boyfriend was so happy to see her that he twirled her around ten times in a parking lot. Fifty-four years stretched before me, and I knew there was only one way to spend them. 

Lisa Thornton is a writer and nurse. She has stories in Wild Roof Journal, Pithead Chapel, Necessary Fiction, and other magazines. She has been nominated for Best of the Net, the Pushcart Prize, and Best Small Fictions. She lives in Illinois and can be found on Bluesky and Instagram @thorntonforreal.