I don’t own a car any more, so I go on a lot of city bus adventures. I’m retired, so it doesn’t matter that it takes hours sometimes to get somewhere I used to be able to drive in half an hour. Today’s route: 7 bus to 49 bus to 44 bus. It’s a route I take once a month or so.

The 7 bus driver is having an animated conversation with two passengers (one in an Hawaiian shirt and one in a striped shirt) about how to get to Walmart when the 7 bus route gets shortened in three weeks. The state is in a standoff with the city about funding, and the transportation authority is preparing for the worst.

I get off to go to the ATM, then catch the 49 bus to buy some flowers. The 49 is quiet. Most of the passengers are going to West Philadelphia to work at the university. They don’t chat the way the people on the 7 and the 48 do, and there aren’t as many elderly people.

Flowers in hand, I run to catch the 44 bus out to the suburbs. I notice a sign that says the 124 and 125 buses are being discontinued, which means the mega mall out in the suburbs will lose a bunch of its workers if the cuts go through. The 44 has about eleven passengers, and we all stare out the window as we roll along the Schuylkill Expressway to Bala Cynwyd. The 44, too, carries people from the city to the suburbs to work.

It’s carrying me to visit my husband’s grave.

It’s a long walk up and down hills from the bus stop to the cemetery, on empty sidewalks past office buildings, apartment buildings, and many, many anonymous lawns, but the cemetery itself is lovely and lush, and the cicadas are shrilling.

I would be visiting anyway, because I visit him once a month, but I have a special mission today. Our adult kid visited their father’s grave a couple of days ago, and was worried that something I had left on it wasn’t there any more, so when I get to his grave marker, I dig down with my fingers and found it, still there.

The buried object is a tiny little red Matchbox toy, a red 1960 Jaguar sedan.

I text a photo of the car to our kid, then bury the car back up and lay my flowers down over it. Then I sit and tell my husband I miss him. It has been almost three years now.

My late husband loved driving. A small, slight man, he liked to drive big cars as if he was the charioteer of the gods, one hand on the steering wheel, going way too fast. For a while early in our marriage, he owned a 1960 Jaguar sedan, and he mourned for years when he had to sell it so we could move.

After he died, my kid put a Matchbox Jaguar sedan next to his grave, but someone eventually took it. I am assuming it was taken by a child visiting a grave with their parents. I ordered a replacement online, and when it came, I buried it deep.

I say goodbye to my husband and to our cat, whose ashes are scattered around his plaque. Neither of them are there, mind you, not really, but I promised him when he was dying that I would visit, and I showed him a picture of the plot I had bought so I could visit, and it comforted him. I heard him telling a friend about it. A promise is a promise.

He is the only person in our family who still owns a car, so I walk back down and up hill and wait for the 44 bus. At the bus stop, a woman and I talk about the transportation cuts, and she tells me she has to go get skin grafts because a pit bull took a chunk out of her leg. I tell her she has to take care of herself. I tell her my husband refused to get a colonoscopy, and it killed him. She says she isn’t due for a colonoscopy until 2030. We agree that you have to take care of yourself.

I take the 44 to the grocery store for dinner fixings, and the 48 home. On the 48, the bus starts turning the corner while I was still standing, and a woman in the front seat says to me, “Hold on. Hold on. Hold on.”

“I”m holding,” I tell her, and we both chuckle.