Delayed with Passengers

On her first graveyard shift, a nervous trainee climbs aboard the 3:33 a.m. Geary coach with a yellow legal pad in her lap and finds the seat behind the veteran driver already occupied by the only rider he has dodged for years: a middle-aged woman in a hospital wristband, holding a damp bouquet wrapped in corner-store plastic. At each stop, the bus kneels for other would-be last riders—a line cook with a split knuckle, a teenage skateboarder with a duffel bag, an exhausted paramedic still in blue gloves—and the driver has to keep them talking while steering through fogged windows and a rattling heater that keeps cutting out on the hills. The trainee slowly understands the rule when she watches him