The Last Run of Route 7

The route

They were at every lane. Every single one.

At stop 9, Dennis Kooiker was standing at the end of his lane in his chore clothes, smelling like the barn, with a thermos of coffee. He handed it up the steps without a word, and Dad took it without a word, and they nodded at each other.

That’s how men out here say most things. A thermos and a nod. I have been married to one for twenty-six years, and I know what a nod like that weighs.

At stop 14, Mrs. Hoogland was sitting in a lawn chair at the end of her lane with a blanket over her knees and her two great-grandsons standing on either side of her like guards. She had a pan of bars on her lap, the ones I’d baked for her the night before.

Dad set the brake and climbed all the way down off the bus to take the pan from her, because she couldn’t get up out of the chair easily. He bent down and kissed her cheek.

“Gertie,” he said. “You didn’t have to come out.”

“Hal Ahlstrom,” she said, “I’m 84 and I’ll come out for whoever I please.”

He was laughing when he climbed back up. It was the first time in maybe three years I’d heard my father really laugh.

Somewhere around stop 16, I noticed the families weren’t going back to their houses. They were getting into their trucks and their cars and following us.

At first it was two or three. By stop 20 there was a line of them stretched out behind the bus on the gravel road, a long tail of dust in the morning sun, driving slow and patient, nobody passing.

Dad saw them in his mirror. He didn’t say anything for a while.

Then, without turning his head, he said, “You did this.”

“I made some phone calls,” I said.

“You promised me, Jill.”

“I didn’t say one word about the money, Dad,” I said. “Not to anybody. Not one family. I told them you were 79 and it was your last day. That’s all.”

He drove for a mile without speaking. The gravel crunched under the tires. Behind us the line of trucks kept coming.

“Seventy-nine,” he said finally, like he was tasting the word. “I suppose they’d have figured that out eventually.”

“I suppose.”

“Your mother,” he said, and stopped, and started again. “Your mother would’ve liked this. She would’ve made the cinnamon rolls herself. Better than Jenny’s.”

The question

At every stop the kids got on. That was the strange part, the part I hadn’t thought about. They still had to go to school. It was still a school day, the last one, and the bus was still the bus.

So at every lane there was a goodbye, and then the children climbed on, and by stop 25 the bus was full of them, and they were all talking about Mister Hal and what their moms had baked and whose card was best.

Dad drove like he always drove. Exactly the speed limit. Signal at every turn. Flashers at every stop. His hand on that door lever never shook once, not one time in thirty stops.

At stop 28, he asked me the question I’d been waiting for.

“Neal know?”

I looked at the back of his head, the white crew cut, the way his ears stick out a little the way Neal’s do.

“I called him last night,” I said. “I told him where you’d be at eight o’clock. I didn’t say anything else.”

He nodded slowly.

“He hung up on me,” I said. “I don’t know if he’s coming, Dad. I want you to know that before we get there. I don’t know.”

“No,” Dad said. “You wouldn’t.”

We were quiet for a stop. Then he said, so low I almost didn’t hear it over the engine and the kids, “He’s ashamed, Jill. He’s been ashamed for two years. That’s a heavy thing for a man to carry by himself.”

“You’ve been carrying it too.”

“I’m his father,” he said. “That’s the job.”