The Two Miles I Pushed My Son

Sunday night

After Chad left, I sat on the porch step and called the only place I knew to call, which was the mobility shop over in Springfield where we had gotten the chair cushions.

A machine answered. Closed Sunday, closed for the regular holiday Monday, back Tuesday at eight.

I called Dave.

He was in a truck stop outside Dallas, and I could hear the diesels idling behind his voice. I told him all of it. The grinding, the bent arm, the dent, Chad jingling the keys.

Dave is not a man who yells. He got very quiet, which is worse.

“He said what,” Dave said.

“He said Eli never goes anywhere anyway. He said he won’t miss it.”

There was a long breath on the line. “I am eleven hundred miles out with a reefer load that cannot sit,” he said. “I cannot turn this truck around. If I run it legal I am home Thursday. I am calling my brother right now.”

“Don’t,” I said. “It’s late. It won’t fix the lift tonight.”

“Robin, that boy has school.”

“I know he has school.”

“The bus,” Dave said.

And there it was, the thing everybody says, the obvious thing, the thing that was not there.

No bus

Here is the part people do not understand until I tell them.

We live four miles out of town on County Road H, past the last turn the school bus makes. There used to be a special route, a smaller bus with a lift, that came out our way for Eli and for a girl named Kayla two farms down.

Last spring the district cut it. Budget. They sent a letter. Kayla’s people moved her to the school in the next county where her grandmother lives. For us, the letter meant that the van was not a convenience anymore. The van was the bus.

I could have kept Eli home Monday. I want to be honest that the thought crossed my mind, because it would have been the easy thing, and because the school would not have said a word about one absence.

But Monday was not a day off for the grade school. The county holiday fell different for them that year, and the school was open, and it was the week they were building the wax museum, which is a thing the fourth grade does where each child picks a person from history and dresses up and stands still until a visitor pushes a paper button taped to the gym wall, and then the child comes to life and says a speech.

Eli had picked a man named Jacques Cousteau, who went down into the ocean in a diving suit. He had a cardboard tank on his back that he and I had made out of two oatmeal cans and a lot of duct tape and silver paint. He had practiced his speech on me forty times. He had a French accent that was really more of a pirate accent, and I loved it.