The Bus That Was Never Full
“I’m not crying.”
“I know you’re not.”
He came, and I sat on the kitchen chair and he stood between my knees and let me put my chin on the top of his head, which he allows about twice a year.
“Somebody has to stay,” he said into my sweater. “And I’m good at staying. I stayed with Grandma Lou that whole week.”
“You are,” I said. “You are very good at it. That is a different thing than having to.”
He said nothing. Then he said, “Everybody looked at their shoes. Even Mrs. Fisk.”
Neil got home at 6:10, with grease in the creases of his knuckles that never fully scrubs out, and a tire-shop shirt with his name stitched over the pocket. He’s a big, slow-talking man, and when I told him he went very still, and then he set his lunch cooler on the counter very gently, the way you set something down when your hands want to do something else.
“The bus is full,” he repeated.
“That’s what she told him.”
“In front of his friends.”
“In front of his friends.”
He looked toward the back bedroom, where Wyatt was supposed to be reading and was actually lying on his bed with the lights off. Then Neil took his keys back off the hook.
“Neil.”
“I’m going to go have a talk with Rhonda Rowan.”
“No.”
“Heather.”
“Please.” I put my hand on his chest. “Not tonight. Not with your face like that.”
“Then what do I do?” he said. “I’m not going to sit on my hands.”
“Find out if it’s true.”
He put his cap back on.
“Gene Prather drives Bus 4,” he said. “I’ve done his tires every month since September. He’ll be at the barn till seven.”
He was gone forty minutes. I fed Wyatt macaroni and watched him move it around his plate. When Neil came back he stood in the kitchen doorway holding his cap in both hands.
“Sixty-six passengers,” he said. “That’s the capacity. Gene’s got the sheet from the transportation office tacked up on the wall of the barn. Thirty-eight fifth graders on the roster, after the drop. Four teachers and aides. Ten parent chaperones. Fifty-two all told.” He looked at me. “Fourteen empty seats, Heather. The numbers went in on the second. Nobody has called Gene about a full bus. Somebody asked him to drop it down by one.”
“By one.”
“By one kid.”
I sat down.
That was the whole of Neil’s part, and it was not a small part. My husband had gone out in the dark to a bus barn in his work boots to count seats, so that when I walked into whatever came next I would be carrying a fact and not a feeling.
The Wednesday table at the Sunrise Café fills up at about 9:30.
It has done it for years. After the school drop-off, a handful of the mothers from the elementary come in, always the same booth by the front window, the one with the cracked red vinyl and the good view of the grain elevator. They order coffee and one slice of pie to split four ways, and I have never once charged for the extra forks. Kristi Hagen, whose husband farms two sections north of town. Becky Lund, who runs the front desk at the dentist’s. Sandy Kuhlman, who does books for half the small businesses in Tolliver out of her spare bedroom and was, for the second year running, the PTA treasurer. And Marcy Stahl, mother of the twins.