The Bond That Put My Girl on the Bus

The money

To understand what that money was, you have to understand my daughter.

Nell is thirteen. She has red hair like my mother has, and she has kept a three ring binder for the eighth grade Washington trip since the first week of October.

The trip had been a tradition at her school for twenty years. Mr. Odom, the history teacher, takes the eighth graders every May, five days on a charter bus, and the kids come home talking about it for the rest of their lives.

The full trip cost was more than we could ever pay. The class had raised most of it with a spaghetti supper, a car wash and a raffle, and each child’s family owed what was left. For Nell, that came to four hundred and twelve dollars.

I told her in the fall that I could not promise it. My check covers the house and the lights and the groceries and not much more, and I have been raising her by myself since she was two.

Her daddy lives in another state with another family. He sends a card at Christmas with twenty dollars in it, and that is about the size of what he gives, and I stopped asking for more a long time ago.

So Nell decided she would raise it herself. She was twelve then. She went to the library and found out how to pour soy candles in canning jars, and she talked me into buying the wax with my tax refund.

She sold them at the church bazaar, and at the ballgames, and door to door up and down our road.

Vanilla and apple and one that smelled like cut pine that the old men liked.

She babysat on Saturday nights for three families. She did it all winter, even in January when the roads were bad and I had to drive her and sit in the truck with the heater on.

Every dollar went in a manila envelope in her binder. She wrote down every sale on a sheet of notebook paper, in pencil, with the date and the name and the amount, and she totaled it every Sunday after church.

By the middle of April she had it. Four hundred and twelve dollars, in fives and ones and a few tens, and she counted it out on my kitchen table twice to be sure.

I will never forget her face when she got to the end of that second count.

She didn’t jump or squeal. She just sat back in her chair and put both hands flat on the table.

“I did it, Mama,” she said. “I really did it.”