The Minute I Held the Bus

I am not proud of this part. If I could go back and do any three weeks of my life over, it would be those.

Danny would see me open the door at the road and start working his way down the lane. Then he would see me close it and drive away, and he would stand there in the cedars.

Then, I found out later, his grandmother would come across the yard from the little house on the back of the place and drive him to school in her Buick. Nobody told me. I saw a stop with nobody at it, wrote “no show” on the sheet, and went on with my day.

The fourth Monday, he was closer. He had come off the porch earlier, I think. Somebody had told him to try harder.

I watched him in the big mirror, three-quarters of the way down the lane, working at it with his whole body. The clock on the dash said go.

I swung the door shut, the way you do something you’ve done twenty times, without any thought in it at all.

Danny saw the door close, and he did the only thing a six-year-old can do when a bus is leaving. He ran.

He ran the only way he could. It was a lurch, a throw of the bad leg and a catching up with the good one. He made about forty feet, and then the leg went out from under him and he hit the gravel.

I saw it in the mirror. I will see it in the mirror until I die.

I was out of the seat before I knew I had moved. I took the three steps down in one go and jerked the door open.

He was already pushing up off the ground with both hands. His knees were skinned raw and there was gravel stuck in the heel of his palm, and the pack had slid down off one shoulder.

I put my hand out to him.

“I got it,” Danny said.

He did not say it angry. He said it flat, like a man telling the foreman he didn’t need the ladder.

He got up by himself. He walked past my hand and past me, up the three steps and into the bus, with blood coming through one knee of his jeans.

Nineteen kids sat on that bus, and not one of them made a sound.

I stood at the bottom of the steps a minute with my hand still out in front of me. Then I got in, and I shut the door, and I set the brake.

I took the clipboard off its hook and studied it for three minutes.

I did not read a word. I held that clipboard like a man with an important piece of paper and stared at it, because I could not think what else to do with my face and my hands while nineteen children watched me.