The Minute I Held the Bus

When I could see again I put the bus in gear and drove to the school. I was four minutes late, and I did not care.

That night I told Doris all of it, at the kitchen table, with my supper going cold in front of me.

She listened with her chin on her hand. When I was done she said, “Well, what are you going to do about it?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “The sheet says one minute.”

“The sheet,” Doris said, “was written by a man with a stopwatch.”

I laughed, and then I did not laugh.

The next morning I had that clipboard out before the bus even stopped at the Reinke mailbox.

I opened the door. I looked at my route sheet like it was scripture. I read the same line eleven times.

Nobody on the bus said anything. I think the older kids understood before I did, because they watched the lane too, and not one of them asked why we were sitting.

Danny came down that lane. Four minutes and some seconds.

He got on the bus and walked down the aisle without looking at me. He took the seat directly behind mine, the first one on the right, and he sat there with his pack on his lap and looked out the window.

He never said a word. Neither did I.

That morning I figured out I had been wrong about whose minute it was.

The sheet said it belonged to the district. But I had spent a year watching a bank clock, and I knew what it cost to be hurried. I decided I would take that minute out of my own morning, not out of the children’s.

So I started my walkaround ten minutes earlier. I quit sitting over coffee at the Olsen place, where Arlene Olsen had kept a cup warm for me since the first week.

When Doris asked why I was leaving the house at a quarter past five, I told her the engine needed time to warm.

She looked at me over her glasses. She knew better. She packed my thermos anyway.

At stop eleven I would open the door, and I would sit there with my clipboard and let a boy walk. I told myself it was just the door being open.

I never said “come on.” I learned to look out the other window.

You learn a lane when you sit at the end of it every morning. I watched that one through four seasons a year. In September the cedars were dusty and the ditch was full of goldenrod. In January the drifts had a crust on them that held a coyote’s track, and Danny’s path down the middle had been walked so many times it was packed blue and smooth as a floor.