Voncile Vass Facebook ad: “My Daughter Recognized Him Off Her Refrigerator”

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"I always did your road first," he said. "Your bus has kids on it." For 18 winters I'd driven Bus 14 up the hollow before daylight, and every snow morning the road was already scraped and salted, and I told the other drivers I was lucky. It wasn't luck. It was a quiet widower who plows for the county, who'd sat at the far end of my daughter's Thanksgiving table 3 years running, and whose face I'd paid a psychic to draw and then called a seed-corn calendar. I'm Lisa. I'm 55. I've driven a school bus in a hill county in the Southern Tier for 18 years. Bus 14, 71 miles a day, 43 kids, first stop at 5:50 in the morning. I know every porch light on that route. I know which dogs chase and which ones just yell about it. What I didn't know, until a drawing I hated told me, was who had been making my road safe to drive on every snowy morning for 18 years. Kayla says I always start this story at the snow and ruin it. So this time it starts at the beginning and goes one day after another. I've been divorced 16 years. I raised Kayla mostly on my own, and I'm not asking for a medal; plenty of women did. But if you do it long enough, you get very good at being needed and very bad at being wanted. My whole working day is other people's kids. I know which 2nd grader has to sit up front because she gets carsick, and which 8th grader's dad isn't coming home. At 4 in the afternoon I park the bus, drive home, and eat supper standing at the counter, because sitting alone at a table for 4 is something I quit doing in my 40s. People told me I was too busy to be lonely, like it was a compliment. I tried the apps one winter. The men in my age range lived 2 counties over and wanted to know right off whether I owned my house. A lady from church set me up with her brother, who spent our whole supper telling me which roads the county ought to have paved. After that I decided I was a grandmother in training and let it go. Then Kayla had the baby. Ivy. 7 pounds, 2 ounces, a full head of black hair and her daddy's chin. I took 2 weeks off the route and moved into their spare room to do nights, because that's what my mother did for me. Here's how nights work in that house. Around 2:30 the baby wakes up. Kayla feeds her in the glider in the corner of the nursery. I do everything else: the diaper, the burping, the walking back and forth. And for 25 minutes of every night, my daughter is stuck in that chair with nothing to do but scroll her phone and look at me. On the 9th night, she found the ad. A lady who sketches, by hand, the face of the man meant for you, and sends a page that says when and where you'll run across him. Kayla turned the phone around so the light hit my face and whispered, "You're doing this. Right now. I'm stuck here 20 minutes and I want to watch." I said no. She said I'd said no to everything for 16 years, and look where it got me: on an ottoman at 2 in the morning with spit-up on my shoulder. She wasn't wrong. She is never wrong at 2 in the morning. She gets that from me. So at 2:44, I did it. My own phone, my own debit card, on that ottoman in the light of a nightlight shaped like a moon. Kayla made me whisper my answers across the room so she could hear them. I figured the questions would be about him. Hair, height, all that. Not one was about him. Who am I when nobody needs anything from me? What do my hands do when I'm nervous? I told the truth on that one: I drive. I get in a car and I drive until it goes away. Kayla said "Mom" in a voice I'd never heard out of her, and then the baby spit up on both of us and that was the end of the moment. It came the next night at 9:50. 19 hours. I opened it in the spare room with the door shut. I'll describe him the way I did to myself that night, which wasn't kind. A big, square-headed man, older than me, with a neck like a stump and a face that had been out in weather his whole life. Heavy eyelids, like he was either about to fall asleep or had just decided something. A nose that sat a little to the left. Short gray hair, cut by somebody who charges 11 dollars. And the top of his right ear had a notch out of it, like something had taken a bite. "She drew me a seed-corn calendar," I said to the ceiling. There are 400 men in my county who look like that, and I drive past most of them twice a day. I zoomed in to find the trick, and what I found was pencil. You could see where she'd pressed down hard on the notch in that ear and gone over it twice, like she wanted to make sure it didn't get lost. I thought, well, at least she's thorough about her mistakes. At the 3 a.m. feed the next night, I typed a refund request with one thumb, because the other arm had Ivy on it. "You drew a generic farmer. I live in a county full of them. I want my money back." She answered by noon, in plain sentences, like a woman who has been up at 3 in the morning herself. I could have my money back whenever I asked for it, she said; the payment processor handles that end, and she has no way to stall it. Then: "Put him somewhere you'll walk past him. Generic men don't stay generic." I didn't take the refund. To be honest, I forgot, the way you forget everything in the 2nd week of a newborn. But I did what she said, mostly out of spite. I printed him on my son-in-law Tyler's printer and stuck him on their refrigerator under a magnet shaped like a cow, with a sticky note: what 1 night of no sleep buys you. Day 5. 6 in the morning. Kayla shuffled into the kitchen for coffee, stopped in front of the fridge, and said, "Mom. Why is Jed on the refrigerator?" Jed is Tyler's dad. Ivy's other grandpa. A widower, 5 years now. I'd met him at the wedding, at 3 Thanksgivings, and in a hospital waiting room 2 weeks before, where he'd brought a box of doughnuts for the nurses and said maybe 12 words to me, 8 of them about snow coming. "That's not Jed," I said. Kayla took the drawing down and held it next to her phone, next to a picture from her own wedding. The heavy eyelids. The nose, a little left. The ear. Jed's right ear has a notch in the top rim from barbed wire when he was a boy. I knew that. I'd heard him tell it at the rehearsal dinner. I had never once connected it to a face, because to me he wasn't a face. He was family furniture. He was the man at the other end of the table who carves and doesn't talk. I said a jaw is a jaw. I said half the county has a notch in something. I said she'd drawn a type and my daughter wanted a story. Kayla just opened the next page, the reading, which I hadn't even bothered with, and read it to me out loud with the baby on her shoulder. Page 2: "He's out before daylight, clearing the way for other people." "Talks to the weather more than to people." Page 3, the when and the where: within 6 weeks. "The first morning it snows. Where you start your day." Jed drives plow for the county highway department, and has for 30 years. Winters he plows. Summers he runs the grader. Kayla said, "Mom. He does roads." I said lots of men do roads. She said, "Which roads?" and I didn't have an answer, and I'd driven the same one for 18 years. Here's something I've said in the bus garage every winter for 18 years, like a joke: my road is lucky. On a snow morning, the drivers on the north end sit in the lot and wait on the plows. Mine, up the hollow and over the ridge and down to the county road, is always done before 5:50. Always. Salted on the hill. Scraped down to the stones. I figured the county just liked that road. I went home at the end of the 2nd week. I didn't call him. What was I supposed to say? Hi, a psychic and your daughter-in-law both think it's you? I went back to the route. It was October, and it didn't snow. I told myself that settled it. Day 41. The first real snow of the year came overnight, 7 inches of it. I got to the district bus garage at 5:10 like always, ready to sit and wait with everybody else. The lot was already plowed. Down to the gravel, corner to corner. A county truck with the blade still down was idling by the fuel pump with its amber light going around, and on the bottom step of Bus 14, lids on, steaming, sat 2 coffees. He climbed out of the truck. Big and square, heavy eyelids, the notch in his ear red from the cold. The face off the refrigerator. "Figured you'd be early," he said. I said, "Did you plow my road?" He handed me a coffee before he answered, like the answer was the less important thing. "I always did your road first," he said. "Your bus has kids on it." 18 winters. He'd been doing it since before our kids ever met. He didn't know the bus was mine until the wedding, when Tyler told him what I did for a living, and he thought, oh, that's her. He never mentioned it. He is not a man who mentions things. I drank my coffee in the bus with the door open and the heater running, and he stood in the snow and talked about the forecast, and it was more words than I'd heard him say in 3 Thanksgivings put together. We've been out 9 times since. He does talk to the weather more than to people, just like the page said. He's working on it. One of Kayla's friends from the moms' group, 34 and divorced, ordered hers after she heard. Hers came back as her little boy's Saturday basketball coach at the rec center, a divorced dad who'd been sitting next to her on the bottom bleacher since the first week of November, handing out orange slices at halftime. She'd been calling him "Coach" for 6 weeks. On day 12 she asked his name. I showed him the pages on our 3rd supper. He read them slow, the way he does everything, and stopped on page 2. "Doesn't sit still?" he said. "I sat in a deer stand 3 hours Saturday and called it a good day." He's right. The page missed that one by a mile, and I'd rather tell you than have you find out I left it out. Ivy is 3 months old now. She has 2 grandparents who sit next to each other at the table instead of at opposite ends, and her mother brings up whose idea it was at every meal. The cow magnet is still on the fridge, holding up the drawing. Kayla crossed out my sticky note and wrote a new one: 1 night of no sleep, worth it. I didn't look up the artist until after the snow, which tells you how much stock I put in any of it. Tina Aldea is her name. She's been at this 30 years, and she's drawn for over 3,000 women. Folks sell copies of her work, so she has one official site, and that's the one to use. By her count, 89% meet him inside 30 days of getting the drawing. I can only vouch for my own count. Mine took 41 days. But it didn't snow until day 41, and the page said the first morning it snows. Where I come from, that's right on schedule. If there's a man you've been looking straight through, somebody who's family or close to it, who you've decided is part of the furniture, that's the part I'd chew on. There's a line in her own warning that it's very often somebody already around you. I wouldn't have believed that about Jed for every dollar in the county. My daughter saw it from across a kitchen at 6 in the morning, before her coffee. The way it works, if you're like me and want to see the route before you get on the bus: a list of questions, every one of them about you. One woman does the drawing by hand, and up close you can see where she bore down and where she rubbed out. After the face come the written pages, which cover what kind of man he is and the when and the where. Inside 24 hours it's in your email. Mine was 19. Magic, I can't promise you. I drive a school bus. I believe in salt, chains and leaving early. But I'll pass along the question my daughter asked me at 2:44 in the morning, because it was a good one: what are you saving your no for? Kayla's friends from the new moms' group keep asking her for it, so she made me type it here: https://officialtinaaldea.com/ That one, not the knockoffs. I'd say it's for the women who got so good at being needed that they forgot they're allowed to be wanted. Everybody else can take it or leave it. EDIT: Folks keep messaging to ask if she's still taking orders, since this got passed around well past our family. From what I can tell, she does every drawing herself and promises each one within a day, so once a week fills up she stops until she's caught back up. One of Kayla's friends ran into a stopped week and had to hold off. I looked this morning before my first stop, and she was taking them. P.S. The quick version, for the skimmers: a woman named Tina Aldea sketches your soulmate by hand and gets it to you within 24 hours, with a page on the when and the where. She's been doing it 30 years, for over 3,000 women. My daughter picked mine out on her refrigerator. Here's the address again: https://officialtinaaldea.com/ P.P.S. Don't just look at yours and decide. Tape it up somewhere you'll walk past it every morning. Somebody else in the house might see what you won't. P.P.P.S. You can get every cent back for 60 days, and it's handled by the payment processor, not her. She made a point of telling me that while I was calling her drawing a calendar. I forgot to ask for it, and I'm glad I forgot. I spend more on windshield washer fluid in a winter. P.P.P.P.S. Look close at mine and she went over the notch in his ear twice. I took it for a mistake she was being stubborn about. It was the one thing about him I already knew. A person drawing by hand can only get to so many faces a week, and that's the whole reason some weeks close. P.P.P.P.P.S. Every snow morning now, 2 coffees on the step of Bus 14. If you're the one doing nights for somebody else, for a daughter, a mother, anybody, maybe the next thing you order at 2:44 in the morning should be for you.

Where the ad sends people

officialtinaaldea.com

My Daughter Recognized Him Off Her Refrigerator

His face, hand-drawn for $37 and delivered within 24 hours, plus a written reading of when and where you'll meet him. 60-day refund through the payment processor.