The Bus Route That Cost Less Than Their Mileage
Eli was at the end of the driveway at 6:40 that Monday morning, and he had been there for a while.
I saw him from the kitchen window with my coffee in my hand. He had his good gray shirt on, the one with the collar. His hair was combed down wet. His backpack hung from the push handles of his chair, and his hands were folded in his lap the way he sits when he is trying to look like he is not waiting for anything.
The bus had always stopped right there, where our gravel meets County Road 212. Hal Fairchild had pulled up to that spot every school morning for nine years, and in all that time he had never once been later than 6:48.
I walked down in my scrubs with my keys still in my hand. It was a long walk. Our drive is a quarter of a mile, and I counted every step of it, because I knew what I was about to say and I did not want to say it.
“Honey,” I said.
“Maybe he’s running late,” Eli said.
“Eli.”
“He’s usually never late, Mom. But maybe.”
We both knew. We had known since the second Monday in August, when his father stood up at the school board meeting with his seed cap in his hands and was told that the vote stood. Eli had been in the truck that night, parked outside the high school gym, and Mark had told him every word of it afterward. He knew exactly what was and was not coming up that road.
He waited anyway.
I will tell you something about my son that I did not understand until that morning. He was not waiting for a bus. He was giving the world one more chance to be what it had always been. That is the kind of boy he is. He was being kind to the bus.
We stood there until 7:20. Then I walked beside him up the quarter mile of gravel while he drove the chair himself. A 290 pound power chair digs into loose gravel, and the whole way I wanted to put my hands on the push handles, and the whole way he made it plain, without a word, that he did not want me to.
“It’s fine,” he said, about halfway up. “I can do my work from the table.”
“I know you can.”
“I’m just saying, don’t make a thing of it.”
I did not answer him. I called the care center from the porch and told them I would be an hour late, and then I called again and made it the whole day.
Here is what you need to know about Route 14.
It was the only special-education bus in the Cedar Fork R-IV School District. One bus, one lift, one aide named Mona, and one driver, Hal Fairchild, who was 61 and had a dented thermos and a way of saying “good morning, my friend” to every child like each one was the best thing that had happened to him all day.
Four children rode that bus. My son Eli, who has spina bifida and has used a power chair since he was six. Jenna Isaacson’s daughter Holly, who was nine and in a chair of her own. Lorraine Boyer’s grandson Cody, who was eleven, and who has autism and cannot be around a crowd of strange children without coming apart. And a first grader named Dalton, whose oxygen tank rode in a harness at his feet.