The Grandmother Who Drove Bus 12
The Mailbox
I kept my promise.
Every morning at 7:12 I turned the ambers on at the creek bridge and brought Bus 12 to a stop at the end of that gravel drive. I opened the door. I counted to ten. I closed the door and drove on.
Most mornings Lisa’s car passed me before I made the tracks, with Tyler in the back seat. He would wave with his whole arm. I would lift two fingers off the wheel.
Bill told me the second week that I did not have to keep stopping. I told him I would stop until Tyler was off my sheet.
“She’s called me twice, Joanne. You ought to know that. Once back in August and once the day after you pulled up out there. She wants you taken off the road.”
“What did you tell her?”
“I told her you had the best road test in this garage in the twenty-two years I’ve been here. I told her she’s his mother and if she wanted Tyler on another bus I’d arrange it that afternoon. And I told her I’d keep watching you, same as I watch all of them.” He looked at me. “I have been. I’ve got nothing to tell her.”
Lisa still came on Saturdays at nine. I want that understood. She never missed one. We did not speak of buses, and she carried the heavy sacks in for me.
She was not a hateful girl. She was a frightened one. It is harder to be angry at a frightened person, and I tried.
It was the first week of November when I found the drawing.
I pulled up at 7:12 and opened the door, and there was nobody at the end of the drive. But there was a sheet of notebook paper taped to the mailbox post, flapping, held on with about a foot of masking tape.
I do not leave my seat with children on board. I set the brake and asked a sixth grade girl named Kelsey, who sat up front, to hop down and fetch it.
It was a yellow bus in crayon. There was a stick person at the wheel with round glasses and gray scribble hair. In the first window behind the driver there was a small stick person in a red coat.
Across the bottom, in pencil, pressing hard: Bus 12 Grandma. Save my seat.
I folded it once and I put it up under the sun visor.
I drove the rest of that route with my eyes swimming, which I do not recommend.
That first seat on the right stayed empty all the way to Thanksgiving. I never told the children to leave it. They just did.
Jeff
He came on a Sunday afternoon and stood on my porch with his cap in his hands. Jeff is a big, quiet man who builds airplane parts all night and would rather take a beating than have a conversation.
He would not sit. He stood on my kitchen linoleum and looked at the typed sheet on my refrigerator.
“I was told you agreed to sell that car,” he said. “That you’d talked it over and decided you were done driving. I never thought to ask you myself. I was asleep or I was at work, and I let it go by me. I found out different three weeks ago, when Tyler asked me why Grandma wasn’t allowed. I should’ve been here the next day. I’m sorry I wasn’t.”
“She didn’t lie to you to be wicked, Jeff.”
“No. She did it because she’s scared sick. She was in that car with her grandma, you know. She still won’t ride with anybody over seventy. She won’t ride with my dad.” He shook his head. “But being scared doesn’t make it right, and I told her so. I told her you passed every test the state of Kansas has got, and that I’ve ridden with men at the plant who couldn’t.”
“What did she say?”
“Not much. She’s not speaking to me a whole lot.” He nearly smiled. “Tyler’s riding the bus tomorrow. I’ll be standing out there with him myself.” He put his cap back on. “Don would’ve had my hide for letting it go this long.”
Monday after Thanksgiving, at 7:12, there was a big man in a Carhartt coat at the end of the gravel drive with a little boy in a red coat.
Tyler came up those steps like he owned the bus.
He looked at the first seat on the right, empty. Then he looked up at the visor, where a corner of notebook paper was sticking out.
“You saved it,” he said.
“I told you I would.”
He sat down right behind me. All the way to the school I could see the top of his head in my overhead mirror, and it was the finest thing I have ever seen in a mirror in my life.