The Bus Route That Cost Less Than Their Mileage
I stepped back from the microphone and walked to my seat. My shoes on the gym floor were the loudest thing in the room.
Sylvia Hubbard went first.
She was a retired home economics teacher, small, with white hair set in a neat roll, and she had voted yes in June. She picked up her pen and put it down. She read the sheet again, all the way to the bottom.
“Gene,” she said, “I want to say something for the record.”
“Sylvia, we are in public comment.”
“I know what we’re in.” She did not raise her voice either. Something about that room made all of us talk low. “I voted for Item 11. It came at 9:40 at night, in a stack of eleven things, and I read the words ‘efficiencies’ and ‘estimated savings’ and trusted the number. I did not know there were four children on that bus. I did not know any of their names.” She turned the sheet over, and back. “I know them now. I want a motion to reconsider on the next agenda, as its own item.”
Oscar Vance, one of the three who had voted no in June, cleared his throat. “Second,” he said, to the room, “whenever it’s time.”
And then Gene Faulkner stopped talking.
I have thought a great deal about what he did next. He took his glasses all the way off and set them on the table. He looked at the sheet for long enough that I started counting the seconds, and I got to eleven.
Then he looked across the floor and found Eli.
“Young man,” he said. The microphone carried it. “Is that your work?”
Eli looked at me. I nodded. He drove forward a few feet on the gym floor, into the light, with the laptop on his tray and his chin up.
“Yes, sir,” he said.
“The columns. The totals. You built that.”
“Yes, sir. It took about four hours. Mrs. Sutter’s records were really well organized.” He glanced down the table at Kay. “That helped.”
A little laugh went through the bleachers and died out.
“It’s good work,” Gene said.
“Thank you.”
Gene folded his hands on the table. “The levy failed twice. We are $412,000 short. We lost two teachers last year, and I was afraid I’d lose more. Somebody had to find the money, and I went down the list for the place it would be missed least.” He stopped. “I counted four children. I put four children in a column.”
He looked at me.
“I did not count mornings,” he said.
Nobody breathed.
“I can’t take a vote on something that isn’t posted, and I won’t pretend I can,” he said. “Mrs. Sutter, put down a special session. Monday the 28th, two weeks from tonight, same hour, and Route 14 is the only item on it.”
“Yes, sir,” Kay said, and wrote it in the minutes.
Two weeks. I did the arithmetic the way Eli would have. That was ten more school days of Eli at the kitchen table. It was not what I had come for, and it was not nothing, and I sat with both of those things while the board went on to its business and the quilting circle gathered up their purses without a sound.
Mark reached over and took my hand. His was shaking. Mine was too. My son drove back to my side and put his own hand on top of ours.