The Pumpkin Patch That Filled a School Bus

She was quiet a minute.

“It probably wasn’t,” she said. “But I probably needed to see it.”

Then Brody came running up holding something in both arms.

It was the ugliest pumpkin in the whole field. I knew exactly which one it was, because I’d noticed it in August and wondered if I should pull it. It was greenish orange, lumpy all over with warts like a toad, with a stem that curled around like a pig’s tail and a flat spot where something had chewed on it.

“This is the one!” he said. “This is the one I wanted! Mom! Mom, I found it!”

“That’s the one you wanted?” Courtney said. “Bud, it’s kind of… it’s not very…”

“It’s the ugly one,” Brody said, deeply satisfied. “Everybody always picks the nice ones. Nobody ever picks the ugly one. So I picked him. He’s gonna be lonely if nobody picks him.”

Courtney looked at that pumpkin for a long time.

Then she held out her hands. “Give him here,” she said. “I’ll carry him.”

“You’ll get dirty.”

“I’m already dirty,” she said, and she took that warty pumpkin and held it against her nice tan jacket, mud and all, like a baby.

When it was time to go, the bus driver opened the luggage bay underneath and somebody had to load twenty-four pumpkins, plus two for the bus driver, plus a white ghost pumpkin a room mom had decided she needed for her porch.

I started to pick up the first one, and Courtney said, “I’ve got it, Diane.”

I told her she didn’t have to. She said, “I know,” and picked up two at once.

And she did it. She went back and forth from the wagon to the bus in those ruined white sneakers with her jacket sleeves pushed up and mud to her elbows, carrying pumpkins two at a time, handing them up to the driver, calling out names so every child would get the right one back.

“Mason, this is yours, it’s got the curly stem. Ava, this is yours. Emma, here’s yours, honey. That’s a good one.”

I watched Emma take her lopsided pumpkin from my daughter-in-law and hold it in her lap on the bus seat like it was the best thing she’d ever been given. Maybe it was.

Roger came and stood next to me with his cap still on backwards.

“Well,” he said, and I said well right back. “She’s carrying pumpkins,” he said, like he was reporting the weather. I told him I could see that.

He put his arm around me. He doesn’t do that in front of people much. “That’s a good thing you did,” he said. And then, because he’s Roger, “I’m still taking this cap off before anybody from church sees it.”

The bus pulled out at two-thirty-five. Twenty-four kids waved out the windows. The bus driver honked twice on the county road.

Courtney rode back to school with the class, because that was her job. But at a quarter past four her car came back up my lane. She got out in her socks, carrying the ruined sneakers in a plastic grocery bag.

“I took your scrub brush home by accident,” she said, and held it up. “And I thought maybe I’d sit a minute.”