The Bus That Was Never Full
I put mine up in answer.
Neil came and stood beside me. He put his arm around my shoulders, and we watched the taillights go down Main Street, past the Sunrise and the bank and the grain elevator, and turn onto Route 23.
“Fourteen empty seats,” he said, after a while.
“Thirteen,” I said. “Now it’s thirteen.”
The October meeting was on the twenty-first, in the school library. Twelve people came, which was an ordinary turnout. Rhonda was not one of them. She had sent her letter on the Monday, in an envelope with Sandy’s name on it, and Sandy read it into the minutes in her flat accountant’s voice, along with the line from April eleventh and the figure of $2,180 and the schedule of payments, and then she asked if there was any other business. There was not. Marcy Stahl took the gavel. Nobody clapped and nobody said anything much. Becky Lund, who had her coat on already, said she supposed she’d bake.
Rhonda has paid $218 on the first of every month. Sandy shows me the deposit slips if I ask. I never ask, but she shows me anyway.
The following Saturday the mothers of the Wednesday table put on a pie auction at the Sunrise Café, with my boss’s blessing. Forty-one pies. Becky baked twelve. We raised $1,420, and every dollar went back into the savings account. The banner in the gym at the November chili supper said the same three words as before, and now there were two signatures on every check beneath it.
A few things went the way they go in a town this size, without anyone announcing them. Rhonda still comes into the Sunrise on Wednesdays, but she sits at the counter now, on the stool by the register, and orders her coffee from the other waitress. Two of the farmers who used to buy their policies from Jeff drive to the office in Carey instead. Nobody has said why.
Wyatt came home from Columbus at nearly six that Friday evening, windburned from the lawn and carrying a flat pressed penny from the Statehouse gift shop in a little paper sleeve. He gave it to me at the kitchen table without a word and then told me for forty-five minutes about the building. He told me where the dome should have gone. He ate three helpings of macaroni.
He still had four dollars and some change from the sandwich bag. He put it back in the drawer by the stove.
While Neil washed up, he said, “Mrs. Rowan sat down across from me at lunch for a minute.”
“Did she?”
“She asked if the sandwich was okay. I said it was good.” He considered. “She looked tired.”
“She was.”
“I’m still good at staying,” he said, turning the penny over under the kitchen light. “But I liked going better.”
I told him I knew.
The last Friday of school the fifth grade had a picnic at the reservoir. Bring your own lunch, the flyer said. He packed his Thursday night, and he left the sack out on the kitchen counter, where I would have to move it to start the coffee.