The Bus Route That Cost Less Than Their Mileage
She called me Wednesday night. Holly had said yes before her mother finished the question. “She says she wants them to see her face when they say the word efficiencies,” Jenna told me, and then she laughed a little. “She’s nine.”
Lorraine Boyer was harder. She was 68 and raising Cody alone since her daughter went into treatment in Joplin. She lived in a small gray house at the end of Pike Road with a porch swing and a collie. She came out with her arms crossed, and I could see she had not slept.
Cody was in the front room, rocking on the couch with headphones on and a stack of train books on his knees. He looked up at me once and then back down. I have learned that when Cody doesn’t look at you, he is giving you the space he gives himself.
“Two times I tried driving him,” Lorraine said, on the porch, keeping her voice low. “The first morning he bolted from the car in the pickup line and a teacher chased him across the lot. The second morning he wouldn’t get out. The bus is the only thing that stays put for him. Same driver, same seat, same time.”
“I know.”
“Do you know what Hal does? He keeps a train book in the seat pocket for him. Hal buys the books himself.” She pressed her lips together. “And now Hal’s driving a substitute run for the elementary, and my grandbaby sits in the house and I’m supposed to say thank you for your input.”
I showed her the sheet.
She read it all the way down. “I won’t put him in front of a crowd unless he picks it,” she said, and she went in and asked him, crouched by the couch with the sheet in her hand, in plain words: did he want to go to the meeting where they decide about the bus. Cody did not look up. He turned a page of the train book. “I’ll bring my headphones,” he said. Lorraine came back out onto the porch with her chin shaking. Then she took a church bulletin and wrote the names and numbers of nine women in the Methodist quilting circle. “Give them a week,” Lorraine said. “They’ll fill the gym.”
There is one more thing I have to tell you about that week, and it is the thing I think about most.
On Wednesday morning at 6:40 I went down to the end of the drive to take Eli’s trash can out, and there was a pickup parked at our mailbox with its engine off.
It was Hal Fairchild. He was sitting on his own tailgate with the dented thermos next to him, and he had a second cup poured and set on the fender.
I stopped in the road. Hal looked at me and smiled, a little sheepish.
“Don’t mind me, Tammy,” he said. “I’ve got a substitute run at 7:30, so I’ve got some time to spare.”
“Hal, you don’t have to.”
“Well, I know I don’t.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “I just couldn’t think of Eli sitting here by himself, waiting on nobody. Somebody ought to be here at 6:40.”
It was the kindest thing anyone did for us that fall, and he did it every morning for two weeks.