The Bus Driver Who Bought Her House

When I first signed the lease, Dale had walked through with me and pointed at the kitchen walls. “You can paint if you want,” he’d said, “just put it back to white when you go.”

I didn’t think about that again for a long time. Then, a few years back, he’d come to fix the furnace and seen the pantry frame, and he’d smiled and said, “You’ll have to paint over those someday, you know.”

I had laughed. I hadn’t known I was going to need an answer.

My kids’ father left when Jess was five. Rick wasn’t a bad man so much as a man who didn’t stay. He lives in Grand Island now, remarried, with two stepkids and a job at the packing plant and not a nickel to spare. He sent what the court said to send until Jess turned nineteen, and then he stopped, which is what the court said too.

So there was nobody to call that night who could fix it. I want to be honest about that. It was me and the kitchen table and a number I could not imagine.

The first thing I did was the thing anybody would do. I got out my phone and looked for another place to rent.

There wasn’t one. Hollis has eleven hundred people, a grain elevator, a café, a Methodist church, a Catholic church and a school that serves three towns. Houses here don’t get rented. They get handed down, or sold to somebody’s cousin.

The nearest rentals were in Fremont and Wahoo, forty minutes either way. If I moved there I’d lose my route, because the district doesn’t pay drivers to commute, and the route is what keeps the lights on.

So that answered that. I could not just go rent somewhere else. I could buy this house or I could start my whole life over at forty six.

I turned the light on and got out a pad of paper.

I make about thirty three thousand dollars a year between my regular route, activity trips and summer custodial work at the school. I had four hundred and twelve dollars in checking and eleven hundred in savings. I had a car with a hundred and ninety thousand miles on it and no other debt.

And I had a retirement account. A 403(b) through the school, the one the district business manager had talked me into fifteen years ago. Fifty dollars a paycheck, every paycheck, never touched.

I hadn’t looked at the balance in a while. That night I logged in, and it said twenty three thousand, four hundred dollars.

I sat and looked at that number the way you’d look at a photograph of somebody you love. It was supposed to be my old age. It was the only thing I had ever saved that I did not have to spend on something.

I went to bed without deciding anything. I didn’t sleep.

The next morning I drove my route like always. Forty one kids, two hours, eleven gravel miles and the highway in between. Little Caleb Weber told me his dog had puppies. A sixth grader cried because she forgot her science project. I did my job.

And all morning I kept hearing it. A bus driver can’t come up with that kind of money.

After the morning route I parked the bus at the barn, got in my own car and drove twenty minutes to the farm credit office in the county seat.