The Grandmother Who Drove Bus 12

And under all of it, I knew where her fear came from. I had been at that hospital too. I knew what she saw when she closed her eyes, and I knew whose fault it was that she ever saw it.

So I said the one thing I could say and still mean.

“Thank you for your concern,” I said.

Part of me did thank her. Somebody was afraid of losing me. At my age that is not nothing. It was the way she had gone about it that I could not swallow.

Lisa let out a breath. She rinsed her cup, and she kissed the top of my head the way you kiss a child who has finally quit fussing.

“I’ll be by Saturday at nine,” she said.

I sat down at my table and looked at that typed sheet for a long time.

I was not thinking about the car, exactly. I was thinking about harvest.

For thirty Junes I drove the grain truck for my husband. A 1974 Chevy C65 tandem with a twenty-foot bed and a hoist, a five-speed with a two-speed axle, and five hundred bushels of wheat on its back. Field to the co-op and back again, fourteen and sixteen loads a day, on sand roads and across the Santa Fe tracks. I backed that truck over a pit grate the width of a card table more times than I could count. I drove it eight months gone with Lisa.

And now there was a list on my refrigerator telling me what day I could go get my hair done.

Riding home with Pam that afternoon, we had come in past the school bus garage on the south side. There was a sign out front on a sheet of plywood, hand lettered. Drivers needed. Paid training. Apply inside.

I had read it the way you read any sign. Now I could not stop reading it.

Two Miles

It was ninety-four degrees by midmorning. I wore my walking shoes and a straw hat, and I walked the two miles from my front door to the bus garage.

The garage was a long metal building with a row of yellow buses nosed in along the fence. A box fan was running in the office. The man behind the desk had a district polo shirt on and grease in the creases of his knuckles, and he stood up when I came in, which I noticed.

“Morning, ma’am. You here about a grandchild’s route?”

“I’m here about the class,” I said. “The one on your sign.”

I had been ready for him to laugh. I had my chin up for it. He did not laugh.

“Bill,” he said, and put his hand out. “I’m the transportation director, which this year means I also drive Bus 12 and change oil.”

“Joanne Keller.”

“Have a seat, Mrs. Keller. Let me ask you a few things.” He pulled a pad over. “Valid Kansas license?”

“Yes.”

“Tickets? Wrecks?”

“One ticket. Nineteen eighty-seven. I rolled a stop sign in Mayfield with a load on.”

That made him look up. “A load of what?”

So I told him about the Chevy. The tandem axle, the twenty-foot bed, the two-speed, five hundred bushels, thirty harvests.

“Whose truck?”

“My husband’s. Don Keller.”

Bill laid his pen down.