The Bond That Put My Girl on the Bus

Mr. Odom

Mr. Odom never said one word about that money. Not to me after that morning, and not to Nell, ever.

I asked her once, carefully, if he had said anything to her about her payment, and she looked at me like I was crazy.

“No,” she said. “Why would he? I paid it in April.”

At the end of the school year he gave her the history award at the eighth grade ceremony.

When he handed her the certificate, he said she asked the best questions of anybody he’d taken in twenty years.

After the ceremony he found me in the gym and shook my hand. He said, “She’s a fine girl, Mrs. Muncy. You’ve done right by her.”

That was all he said. I don’t believe I’ve ever been thanked better by anybody in my life, and he never knew he was doing it.

The Fridays

Rory went back to work in July. An old foreman of his named Wade got him on with the county road crew, patching blacktop and mowing right of way. It’s not the mine money, but it’s steady.

He caught his truck note up by September. He goes to church most Sundays now, in the back pew on the left. He sings now, a little, when he knows the hymn.

And he wears that cap every single day. The pin has a dent in it now from a falling limb.

He won’t let me get him another one. He says the dent is part of it.

The first Friday after he got his first check, I pulled into the gas station on my way to work.

It was early, and the sun was coming up over the ridge, and the air had that cool wet smell again.

Rory was at pump four. He waited until I got out of my truck, and then he walked over and put a twenty dollar bill in my hand.

“First one,” he said. “Every Friday till it’s paid.”

I didn’t argue. I knew better. I folded it and put it in my jacket pocket and said thank you, and he nodded and went back to his truck.

He’s done it every Friday since. Rain or shine, same pump, same time, a little after six thirty in the morning. I’ve never once had to ask.

I put every one of those twenties in the cedar box on my closet shelf, in Daddy’s old bank envelope, the one that says “For something that matters.”

I don’t know yet what I’ll do with it when it’s full again. I expect I’ll know when the time comes. Daddy always said I would.

But I know this much. Every Friday morning, when I pull into that gas station and see my brother standing at pump four with a twenty in his hand and that little blue pin on his cap, I know Daddy’s money went exactly where it was supposed to go.