The Grandmother Who Drove Bus 12

The Garage

Bill got there in eleven minutes with a load of sand in the shop truck. A deputy came and saw to Josh and his pickup. Bill looked my bus over and climbed aboard.

“I can have Carl bring another bus and take these on in,” he said. “Nobody would blame you.”

“I’d like to finish my route, if you’ll allow it.”

He studied my face. Then he sat down in the front seat across from Tyler.

“I’ll ride along,” he said.

We delivered all thirty-one of them at twenty miles an hour.

Back at the garage I walked to the back and checked every seat for a sleeping child, same as any other day. I filled out the incident report at the long table by the coffee pot. Bill took the memory card out of the bus camera and shut his office door.

The other drivers were coming in off their routes, stamping their feet. Kim sat down and put her shoulder against mine.

At a quarter to ten the side door opened and my daughter came in.

She had fixed her hair. Her knee was skinned through her stocking. She had a white envelope in her hand, the kind with the bank’s name printed in the corner.

There were eight or nine drivers in that room, and every one of them knew who she was.

“Mom,” she said. “Can I talk to you?”

“You can talk to me right here. These are my friends.”

Bill’s office door opened.

“Mrs. Rasmussen,” he said. He was polite about it. “Before you two visit, I’ve got something I’d like you to see, since you asked me twice to look into it.”

He set his laptop on the long table and turned it around.

It was the camera over my windshield. No sound, just the picture. There was the blacktop, and my hands on the wheel, and the headlights coming from the west.

We all watched my hands. They did not jerk. They moved the wheel to the right and held it there.

The pickup went across the screen like something thrown.

Bill ran it twice.

“I’ve been at this twenty-two years,” he said. “I have drivers thirty years younger than your mother who would have locked up and put that bus square into the side of that boy’s truck. I might have done it myself. She heard that road freeze before the rest of us knew it, and she had my whole fleet slowed down two minutes ahead of time.” He closed the laptop. “You asked me if she was safe to carry your son. That’s my answer. I’ve got no better one.”

Lisa stood there. Nobody in the room helped her, and nobody hurt her either.

“I was in the car,” she said. Her voice was thin. “With Grandma. I was sixteen. She never even slowed down for that sign. I can still hear it.” She pressed the envelope flat against her coat. “And nobody had stopped her, Mom. Everybody knew, and nobody stopped her. I swore to God I would never just stand there and let it happen again.”

And here is the part that I had not said out loud in twenty-eight years.

“You’re right,” I said. “Nobody stopped her. I didn’t stop her.”

Lisa looked up.

“Your dad told me to take Mother’s keys a year before that wreck. She had clipped her own mailbox. She got turned around coming home from church. I knew. And I could not bring myself to hurt her feelings, so I let my own girl get in that car.” My voice wanted to go and I would not let it. “That man lay in a hospital in Wichita six weeks. You broke your collarbone. That was on me, Lisa, not on you. You have been carrying something all these years that was mine to carry.”

She had started to cry, the quiet kind.

“So I understand why you did it,” I said. “I want you to hear me say that. But you did not do what I failed to do. I should have sat down with my mother and told her the truth to her face. You didn’t sit down with me. I put your name on that title so you would be spared trouble at my funeral, and you used it while I was at my sister’s with a suitcase. You took the car of a woman who could still drive, and you did it behind my back, because it was easier than finding out whether you were right.”

“I know.”

“And then you tried to take this away from me too.”