The Last Run of Route 7

The January morning Dad’s hand shook on the door lever, I was standing at the office window of the school with a cup of coffee going cold, watching Route 7 pull into the loop.

It was nine below zero. The buses came in one after another with their heaters roaring and their windows frosted at the corners, and Dad’s was always the fourth, because Route 7 is the longest one in the district.

I watched him set the brake. I watched him reach for the long chrome lever that opens the door, the way he has done ten thousand times, and I watched his hand miss it.

He tried again. His fingers closed on the lever and stayed there, and even from forty yards away, through the glass and the frost, I could see the shake running down his arm.

The kids waited. Nobody yelled. Then the door swung open and they came down the steps in their snow pants and their stocking caps, and Dad nodded at every single one of them, the way he always does.

He was 79 years old. He had been driving that bus for three years, since he was 76, and before that he had driven it for nineteen years while he farmed, and he had quit once already, with a cake and a plaque in the school gym.

He went back, he told everybody, for something to do.

I knew better. I knew exactly why my father was out on fifty-eight miles of gravel at 6:20 every morning in a northwest Iowa winter, and the reason was my brother.

That night I called Neal. I hadn’t planned what I was going to say, and I said it badly, the way you do when you have been holding something for a long time.

“His hand shook so hard on the door he couldn’t open it,” I told him. “Neal, he’s 79. He’s out there on ice in the dark because he doesn’t have his money.”

There was a long pause on the line. I could hear a television somewhere behind him, a basketball game, and Robin saying something in the kitchen.

“He told me he likes it,” Neal said finally. “He says it gets him out of the house. You know how he gets, sitting around since Mom.”

“You know that’s not why.”

“Jill, I can’t do this tonight,” he said, and his voice was flat and tired, not angry. “I’ve got payroll Friday and two cars on the lot that won’t sell. Leave it.”

Then he hung up. He didn’t slam it. He just ended the call, the way you close a door on a room you don’t want to look into, and that was somehow worse.