Samuel Osei had driven a city bus for thirty years, and he knew every street by heart: the bus numbers, the colors of the signs. What he did not know was how to read a word. He had hidden it all his life, with a skill that any spy would have envied, and when someone handed him a note, he had a sentence ready: "I forgot my glasses. Can you read it for me?"
One morning a letter came from his granddaughter Grace, who was nine and lived in another city. Her handwriting was big and round. He held the envelope for a long time. Then he put it in his jacket pocket and carried it there for thirty-one days. At every red light he took it out and looked at it, as if it might start to speak, and then he put it back, and the lights changed, and the bus went on, a little heavier than before.
On the thirty-first day he noticed a poster at the bus depot: "Free evening reading class. Tuesdays at seven." He drove past the school three times, a man who could find any street in the city and could not find a door. The fourth time he went in and sat at the very back. The teacher, Ms. Lindqvist, looked at him as though she had been expecting him all along. "Everyone in this room started with the first letter," she said. "Nobody here is behind."
After four months Samuel sat down at his kitchen table, took out the letter, which was now as soft as cloth from his pocket, and read it aloud, slowly, with his finger under each word: "Dear Grandpa, I lost a tooth. When are you coming? I will show you. Love, Grace." He read it three times, the way one drinks water after a long walk. Then he took a pen and wrote his own answer, one careful letter at a time. It took him an hour. "Dear Grace, I am coming on Saturday. I have something to show you too."
