The Minute I Held the Bus

In April the meltwater ran in the ruts. In May the meadowlarks sat on the fence posts along it, one every fifty feet, and sang at the bus like they had been hired to.

I would not have seen any of it at a minute a stop. I had driven past that lane twenty times before I knew it was pretty.

About the third week of that October, a kid in the back, a third-grade boy named Marty Halloran, leaned over the seat and asked me a question.

Marty was a pest. He was the sort of boy who asked why the sky was blue and why the bus had a number.

“Mr. Boyd,” he said, loud enough for the whole bus. “Why do we always wait for Danny?”

The bus went quiet. Danny, in the seat behind me, did not move.

I thought about it. I could feel Danny listening. I decided the only honest answer was the shortest one.

“Because he’s coming,” I said.

Marty thought that over. He looked out the window at the boy halfway down the lane.

“Okay,” he said, and sat back.

That was the end of it. He never asked again. Nobody on that bus ever teased Danny Reinke about his leg, not once in twelve years, and I never said a single word to any of them about it.

Danny did not speak to me for most of a year.

It wasn’t rudeness. He had learned early that people say kind things to children with something wrong, and that kind things said in a certain voice can hurt worse than silence. So I said “good morning, Danny” the same as to the rest of them, and let him not answer.

In the spring of his second grade year, he got off at the school and said it over his shoulder, not turning around. “Morning.”

I about drove into the flagpole.

That was all of it, one word thrown back on the way down the steps. I took it home to Doris like a man carrying an egg.

His mother came to see me that summer.

Joyce Reinke was a tall woman with strong forearms from the laundry, and she stood in my driveway in her work shoes with her purse held in front of her in both hands.

“I heard what you do,” she said.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Mother Reinke saw it from the back yard,” she said. “She said the bus sits at the road and the door’s open the whole time, and there’s a man in there reading a clipboard upside down.”

I looked at my shoes.