The Bond That Put My Girl on the Bus

Why Rory had it

The last payment was due at the school office by the Friday a week before the bus left. Mr. Odom wanted cash or a money order, and he wanted it in hand so he could settle with the bus company.

That week I was working doubles. Two of my laundry girls were out with a stomach bug, and the hospital cannot run a day without clean sheets, so I was in at seven and out after seven.

Rory had been stopping by most evenings. He had time, Lord knows, and he liked Nell, and she liked him.

He was the one who drove her to her babysitting jobs when I couldn’t.

He drove past the school every morning on his way to the job board in the next town.

When Nell worried out loud about getting the money in on time, he said he’d carry it.

“I’ll drop it at the office Friday morning, Nellie,” he told her. “Mr. Odom will have it before first bell. Don’t you worry about a thing.”

She gave him the envelope at my kitchen table on Thursday night. I watched her do it.

I didn’t think one thing about it, because he was her uncle and my brother and that was what family did.

He never went to the school office that Friday. That night he drove to the river instead.

The drive to work

I don’t remember much of the drive from the gas station to the hospital.

I remember the radio was on the gospel station and I turned it off, and then I turned it back on.

I clocked in at five till seven. I started the first loads. I checked the linen carts for the third floor and signed off on the delivery, and my hands did all of it while my mind was somewhere else.

The bus left Friday morning at six thirty. It was Wednesday. That gave me two days, and one of them was nearly gone before I even got my coat off.

I thought about calling Rory and telling him to sell something. But he had already sold his four wheeler in February and his deer rifle in March.

All he had left was the truck, and the bank owned more of it than he did.

I thought about asking Mr. Odom to let Nell go and pay later. But the money was not his.

It went to the bus company and the hotel, and he had already covered two other children out of his own pocket that year. Everybody in town knew it.

I thought about telling Nell the truth and letting her stay home. And I knew I could not do that to her, not after seven months, not after the binder and the candles and the cold nights in my truck.

There was no time for Rory to pay it back before that bus left, and if I waited on him, my girl would be standing in our yard watching it go without her.

So around ten that morning, folding pillowcases in the back room by myself, I knew what I was going to do.

I had known it since the pump clicked off. I just had to say it to myself plain.