The Driver Delano Mills Refused To Lose

The vote to reinstate my authorization immediately, and to direct the district to formally apologize for the manner of the suspension, passed without a single no. June asked Mrs. Kirsch, in front of everybody, to work with me personally over the following week to make sure nothing like this ever happened to a volunteer again without a face to face conversation first. To her credit, Mrs. Kirsch agreed, and she came to my house herself two days later, sat at my kitchen table where Marisol had sat before her, and apologized in a way that sounded like she meant it rather than a way that sounded like a script. I have no interest in holding a grudge against a woman who was new to this town and trusted a broken filing system more than she trusted the men who had spent their whole lives building it. I told her as much, and I meant it.

The board did one more thing that night that I did not ask for and would not have thought to ask for. June proposed, and the board approved unanimously, that the activity bus itself, the one I have driven for twenty eight years now, be formally recognized with a small brass plaque above the driver’s seat reading “The Combs Coach, in honor of Staff Sergeant Delroy Combs, United States Army, First Cavalry Division, twenty eight years of service to the children of Delano Mills.” They scheduled the unveiling for the following Friday, before the season’s biggest home game, so the whole town could be there.

I stood in the school parking lot that Friday evening in September sunlight so bright I had to squint, with that bus parked behind me and its new plaque catching the light, surrounded by more of this town than I had seen in one place since Corrine’s funeral, though this time every face in the crowd was smiling instead of grieving. Lonnie stood beside me in his cap. Marisol stood with Emmett’s hand in hers. The football team lined up in their jerseys and gave me a cheer loud enough to rattle the bus windows, and somewhere behind all of it, June Alvarez shook my hand and told me the district was lucky to have me and always had been, they just needed reminding.