He braided her hair at the counter because the bathroom mirror made her fidget and the kitchen light was better. His hands were broad and scarred across the knuckles, with grease worked so deep into the lines of them that no soap entirely removed it, and they were, in Sofia's long experience, the safest instruments in the world. He divided her hair into three, crossed left over middle, right over middle, unhurried, checking the tension with his thumb the way he checked a belt on an engine, by feel more than by sight. Marisol had taught him on a doll with yarn hair, laughing, pregnant, sitting backward on a kitchen chair in this same room in a different life. "Slower," she had said. "You do everything like you're being timed. Nobody is timing you, Tomas." He thought about that most mornings. He had been timed for so much of his life that unlearning it was the work of years, and he was not done, and he suspected now he never entirely would be.
"Picture day is Friday," Sofia said.
"I know. I wrote it down."
"On the fridge and also in your phone?"
"On the fridge, in my phone, and Ben is going to remind me at lunch, and if all three of those fail your grandmother will teleport into the depot and remind me personally."
Sofia considered teleportation as a possibility available to her grandmother and found it plausible. "Wear the blue shirt," she decreed. "Not a work shirt. The blue one makes you look like a dad in a book."
"I will wear the blue shirt," he promised, "and I will stand in the back where the other dads in books stand, and I will not fix the photographer's tripod even if it is wobbling."
"It was wobbling last year."
"It was. And I fixed it. And we were late for ice cream. I have learned my lesson at great cost."
She laughed then, the full, startling laugh she had inherited entire from her mother, and the kitchen, which was only a kitchen, became for a moment the best-defended place in Ohio.
The walk to the school gate took eleven minutes and they spent most of them on Sofia's current campaign, which was that a class goldfish named Captain Bubbles had opinions and that those opinions were being ignored by the school administration. Tomas listened with the total attention he gave to diagnostic problems and to his daughter, which were the two categories of thing he believed deserved it. At the gate there were other parents, younger mostly, cleaner mostly, a few who nodded at him and a few who knew his name and one, a woman named Carla who ran the bakery on Main and brought day-old rolls to the depot sometimes, who always asked how Rosa was and always meant it. Nobody at the gate knew anything about him except that he fixed the buses and that his wife had died and that his daughter's braids were never crooked. He preferred it exactly that way. Alder Falls was a town of eleven thousand people that behaved like a town of nine hundred when it came to knowing things, and the fact that it did not know this particular thing was a small daily mercy he had worked hard to arrange.
"Two kisses," Sofia said at the gate, as she said every day, holding up two fingers like a referee giving a ruling. "One for now and one in the pocket for later."
He kissed her forehead twice, checked that the second kiss had been properly deposited in the pocket of her jacket, accepted in exchange one sticky sticker of a dinosaur for the inside of his locker, and watched her go up the steps with her backpack riding high and her braid swinging, and did not wave after she stopped waving, because they had negotiated that too. Then he put his hands in the pockets of his work jacket and walked the six blocks to the depot through a town that was only just opening its eyes, past the hardware store and the courthouse square and the war memorial with its one missing letter, and the fog came off the river behind him and the day, ordinary as a held breath, began.
The depot smelled of diesel and cold concrete and the sharp green bite of coolant, and it was, in its way, as honest a place as Tomas had ever worked. A bus did not care what you had been. A bus cared whether the torque was right. He clocked in at six forty, hung the dinosaur sticker inside his locker door next to a photograph that had been there for nine years, changed into the navy overalls with HERRERA stitched over the pocket in thread that had faded from white to the color of old paper, and went to find out what the night shift had left him.