The Bus That Was Never Full
So I sat there and turned over the thing that bothered me. It was not only that Rhonda had told a lie. It was the shape of it. A president with an empty seat has no reason to turn away a kid whose mother is standing there holding the cash. She has a reason only if there is something she cannot afford to say out loud.
And I remembered the banner.
Every November for two years, Tolliver Elementary has held a chili supper in the gym, and on the wall by the serving line the PTA hangs a hand-painted banner that says Every Kid Goes. A family who cannot afford the field trip fee does not have to say so out loud. The money comes out of a fund the rest of us fill all year, with pies and cakewalk tickets and, once, a hand-stitched quilt that Marcy Stahl’s mother raffled off for $410.
I had worked the pie table both years, and put $40 into the fund myself on top of the pies, because I remembered being a girl in a hand-me-down coat watching a bus pull away.
Rhonda had stood on the stage at last year’s supper, into the microphone, and said, “Because of you, no child in this town will ever be left standing on the curb.”
So I asked myself the plain question. If the bus was not full, and the fund was there, why would Rhonda tell a ten-year-old no?
The only answer I could see was that the fund might not be there.
Wyatt came out of school at 3:05 with his jacket tied around his waist and a worksheet folded in his back pocket, and he did not say anything about the morning, and neither did I. We drove home with the radio on low. He asked if he could make his own snack. He made a peanut butter sandwich with the crusts cut off, which he does when he is trying not to think, and he sat down at the kitchen table to do his spelling.
After about ten minutes he said, without looking up, “Mom, I put my lunch back.”
“What do you mean?”
“I packed it Sunday night. For Friday.” He turned his pencil over. “Crackers and a granola bar and the juice box. It was on the second shelf in the pantry. I took it all out and put it back where it goes. The sack’s in the drawer. So you don’t have to worry about it.”
I turned off the water.
He had packed his lunch for a trip he had not been told he could go on, and set it on the second shelf where I would not trip over it. And this afternoon, in the four minutes between the bus and my kitchen chair, he had unpacked it, juice box by juice box, and folded the sack flat and put it away neatly, the way you put away a good dish you are not going to use.
“Wyatt.”
“It’s okay.”
“Come here.”