The Bus That Was Never Full
Because I had texted Rhonda on the twenty-ninth of September. I still had it on my phone. The deadline had been the thirtieth, and Neil’s first paycheck from the tire shop would not land until Friday the third, and I had written, “Can I bring Wyatt’s $65 on Tuesday the 7th? I’ll have it in cash.” And she had written back, “Tuesday is fine, hon! Don’t you worry.”
It had not been fine. She had decided something between that text and this table, and she had decided to tell my son rather than me.
“That’s okay,” Wyatt said.
He said it before I could. He said it in the flat, careful voice of a child who has decided to be easy.
“Somebody has to stay back, I guess,” he said. “It’s all right.”
Rhonda gave him a small, sad smile and picked her pen back up.
I put the envelope in my coat pocket. It took me two tries to get it in.
“Thank you for telling him yourself,” I said to Rhonda.
I said it pleasantly. I meant every word of it to be heard exactly as it sounded, and I watched her try to decide whether it was a kindness. She said, “Of course,” and her eyes slid down to the cash box.
Then I walked my son to his classroom door, and I put my hand flat between his shoulder blades, and I felt him breathing under the backpack, quick and shallow, and I said, “I’ll be here at 3:05.”
“I know, Mom.”
“You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“I know,” he said. And went in.
Tuesday is my day off. I did not go home. I sat in my Pontiac in the school lot with the heater running and the envelope on my knee until the custodian, Mr. Penrose, knocked on my window to ask if I was all right.
I was forty-three. I had waited tables at the Sunrise Café on Main Street for nineteen years, the six-to-two shift, and I knew every farmer in four townships by his order. My husband Neil, a good diesel mechanic, had been laid off in August when the implement dealer over in Carey closed its service shop, and he had taken a job at Rasch Tire & Alignment at a third less money. We were not drowning. We were tight in the way a family gets tight when one check stops and the next has not started, so that $65 is not a small number but a fork in a road.
I knew what Rhonda had concluded about me. She had looked at the way I dressed, and at the fact that I worked six days a week and never came to the evening meetings, and she had concluded I would take it.
I could have gone into the office and asked for the principal. Mr. Ritter would have found Wyatt a seat in about the time it takes to say so. But the trip belonged to the PTA, and the list was Rhonda’s list. If I went over her head, Wyatt would get a seat, and the whole fifth grade would know exactly how he got it. He would be the boy whose mother ran to the office.