The Last Run of Route 7

The drawing

Evie had been waiting this whole time with her mother’s hand on her shoulder, holding that flat thing against her chest. Now she stepped forward, past Neal, right up to the bottom step of the bus.

“Mister Hal,” she said. “I made you something.”

She held it up. It was a drawing on a piece of manila paper, done in crayon, a big yellow bus with its red stop arm out and black wheels and a sun in the corner with lines coming off it.

In the driver’s seat there was a man with white hair and glasses, and a smile that went almost off his face.

Underneath, in careful first-grade letters that leaned downhill, she had written Mr. Hal, and then, a little smaller, the number 7.

“That’s you,” Evie said, pointing. “Driving. Because you’re the best driver.”

Dad took the drawing in both hands. He looked at it for a long time. I watched his thumb move across the crayon man in the driver’s seat, back and forth, very gently.

“Well, Evie,” he said, and his voice was gone almost to nothing. “That’s the best picture anybody ever made of me.”

“You can keep it,” she said. “Forever.”

“I will,” he said. “I promise you.”

Then he looked over her head at his son.

“Get on, Neal,” he said. “Sit up front where I can see you.”

Neal climbed on. I moved back a seat to give him the one behind Dad, and he sat down in it, and he was crying in a quiet way, looking at the floor, and Evie climbed on and sat down right next to him like she had known him all her life.

Dad stood on the bottom step one moment longer. He looked back down the gravel road at thirty families standing beside their trucks in the morning sun. He lifted one hand to them, just once, the way he waves at a neighbor from a tractor.

Then he climbed back into his seat, set Evie’s drawing on the dash, and reached for the door lever.

The door swung shut. The red stop arm folded in against the side of the bus for the last time.

He released the brake, and we pulled onto the blacktop toward town.

The empty bus

At the school, the kids got off one at a time, the way they always did. Every single one of them said goodbye to Mister Hal on the way down the steps. Some of them hugged him. Some of them just said it.

When the last child was off, Evie went down the steps, turned around at the bottom, and waved. Dad waved back. Then the door closed, and it was just the three of us on the empty bus.

Neal didn’t move up to the front. He stayed in the seat right behind Dad, and I stayed one back from him, and Dad pulled out of the loop and turned toward the bus barn, a mile out on the edge of town.

“You remember when Mom used to bring us out to meet your bus?” Neal said finally. “When you were driving for Kraayenbrink. She’d park the station wagon at the corner and we’d wave.”

“I remember,” Dad said.

“You used to honk twice. Just for us.”

“I did,” Dad said. “Your mother said it scared the cattle. I did it anyway.”

Neal leaned his head against the window. “I’m going to pay you back, Dad. All of it.”

“I know you will,” Dad said. “I knew you would. I just wanted you to get there on your own.”