The Last Run of Route 7

The last year

The shaking didn’t go away after January. Some days it was worse than others. On cold mornings it was bad, and on the mornings after a bad night it was bad, and he started holding his coffee cup with both hands at the kitchen table.

He never missed a day. Not one. He drove through a February ground blizzard that closed the highway to Sioux Falls, creeping along at fifteen miles an hour with his flashers on, and every child on Route 7 got to school.

In March, he went in for his yearly physical, the one the state requires for anybody who drives a school bus. He passed. The doctor told him there was no reason he couldn’t keep going.

Two days later he walked into the transportation director’s office and told him this would be his last year.

Jeff, the director, told me about it afterward in the break room. Jeff is a big, quiet man who has known my father since he was a kid riding Route 7 himself.

“He said he didn’t want to be the old man who stayed too long,” Jeff said, stirring his coffee. “He said he’d rather quit one year early than one day late. I didn’t argue with him. I don’t think I could’ve.”

Dad never told me himself. He told me at Sunday dinner, three weeks later, like it was nothing, between the roast beef and the pie.

“Well, I’m done in May,” he said. “Jeff’s got a girl lined up for Route 7. Farm wife out by Boyden. She’ll do fine.”

“Dad,” I said. “That’s good. That’s really good.”

He nodded and cut his pie with the side of his fork. “Thirty-one stops,” he said, mostly to himself. “I’ll miss those kids.”

That was the moment, I think. Not anything bigger. Just my father, sitting at his own table in his tan zip-up jacket with his pie, saying he would miss those kids.

Because I realized nobody knew. Thirty-one families had put their children on that bus every morning for three years, and not one of them knew that the old man driving it was 79, or that he had come back out of retirement, or that his hands shook on the cold mornings.

They thought he was just Hal. Hal who drove the bus. Hal who had always driven the bus.

Thirty-one phone calls

I want to be honest about this part, because it matters.

I thought about breaking my promise. Lying in bed that night next to Kent, I thought about driving to Sioux Center in the morning and walking into that lot and saying everything I had never said.

But it was Dad’s money, and Dad’s choice to lend it, and Dad had asked me for one thing. He had looked at me over his glasses and asked me not to fight my brother.

So I couldn’t fix the money. That was his to fix, and Neal’s. All I could do was make sure that when my father drove his last run, the whole county saw who he was and what he had carried.

“You’re going to do something,” Kent said in the dark. He wasn’t asking.

“I’m going to call the families,” I said. “On Route 7. All of them. I want them out at the end of their lanes on the last day.”

“You can’t tell them about Neal,” he said.

“I won’t. I won’t say one word about the money. I’ll just tell them he’s 79 and it’s his last day.”

“That’s enough,” Kent said. “That’s plenty. People out here will know what to do with that.”

The next morning I asked Jeff for the Route 7 list. Jeff looked at me over his reading glasses, and then he printed it out without a single question and handed it to me across the desk.

“There’s thirty-one,” he said. “Some of them have got four kids on there. Some have one. The Van Wyks are the last stop before the blacktop into town.”

“I know who the Van Wyks are,” I said.

“Course you do.” He tapped the paper. “Put me down too. I’ll be at the barn.”