The courtesy shuttle van

A woman rides the courtesy shuttle four blocks to a coffee shop, orders nothing, and returns forty minutes later carrying a paperback she did not have going in. The van runs a fixed loop within a two mile radius of the shop, a radius set less by generosity than by how long a single technician can be spared from the bay to drive it. The seats are the same vinyl bench as the one in the waiting room, minus the tufting, arranged in three rows behind a driver's compartment that smells faintly of pine air freshener layered over something less resolved. A seatbelt chime sounds at every stop regardless of whether anyone has unbuckled, a quirk no later engineer has bothered to fix. The radio stays on one AM station at a volume low enough to be furniture rather than entertainment, the preset unchanged in years because the buttons stick and no driver has cared enough to fight them. Riders tend to sit in the same seats each visit without being told to, a pattern the driver has stopped remarking on. The route passes a school, a hardware store, and two other repair shops before looping back, none of them stops, all of them landmarks by which regular riders judge how much longer the ride will run. On a full day the van makes the loop eleven times before the last customer is dropped at a car with new brakes and nowhere urgent to be.

Arthur Pell