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47 Last Stops One of the clergy grandfathers would take me on a rural route, a green, streamlined bus with a restroom stop on the way to his church, which was stale from being closed up all week. It was a two-bus trip to Mary Nell’s, but sometimes I’d skip the transfer just to walk and smell the neighborhood of soaps, and I swear I could smell the brick. My stop on the Hardy Street line was bare earth parking lot, with a yard of railroad ties across the street, and a store behind me, where I’d duck in to look at the owner’s daughter, who vanished into a New York modeling career. I’d wave to people I knew on the porches between the first two stops on the way downtown, dizzy myself with a motionless stare as we accelerated past factories, a mixture of hot metal and burned coffee filling the bus. I loved the swoosh of air brakes and the doors folding in like wings, the dash onto the sidewalk as if I had a purpose, and the sighs of a revolving door, injecting perfume and leather into the diesel air. J.C. ...

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