The Grandmother Who Drove Bus 12

And I steered right, off the glazed asphalt and onto the gravel shoulder and the dead grass beyond it, because frozen grass will hold a tire when an icy blacktop will not. I put my two right wheels out there and kept the left ones on the edge, and that bus pulled down straight as a string.

The pickup came through the stop sign sideways.

He went across my front bumper so close that I could see the feed store cap on his dashboard. I do not believe there was ten feet between us. He slid across both lanes, spun once, and went backward into the far ditch with his headlights pointing at the sky.

Bus 12 stopped.

Nobody had left a seat. Nobody had bumped a head. A first grader in the fourth row had dropped a lunch box, and that was the whole of it.

I set the parking brake. I put on the flashers. My heart was going like a hammer and my hands were steady as fence posts.

“Is anybody hurt?” I said. “Tell me now.”

Nobody was.

I walked the aisle anyway and counted every head, twice. Thirty-one.

I got back on the radio. I told Bill where I was, that there had been no contact, that all thirty-one were unhurt, and that there was a pickup in the west ditch with the driver moving.

“I’m on my way,” Bill said. “Don’t you move that bus.”

The young man climbed out of his truck and stood in the road with his hands on his knees. He was nineteen, a boy named Josh from the feed store.

“Nobody’s hurt, son,” I told him. “You stand right there and breathe.”

That was when I saw Lisa.

She had gotten her own car stopped a good ways back. She was coming up the shoulder on foot in her office shoes, going down on one knee and getting up again, with her coat open and her hair in her face.

I opened the door.

She got hold of the handrail and pulled herself up onto the bottom step and looked down that aisle. Thirty-one children, all in their seats, all looking back at her.

“Hi, Mom,” Tyler said. “Grandma didn’t even spill us.”

Lisa looked at him. Then she looked at me.

She did not say a word. She was holding that rail so hard her knuckles were white.

“He’s fine, honey,” I said. “They’re all fine. Now get back off this road and get in your car with the heater on. Go on.”

She went. I watched her in the mirror the whole way.