The Bond That Put My Girl on the Bus

Sunday

Sunday morning I went to church by myself. It felt strange without Nell beside me in the pew, writing notes on the bulletin about the sermon the way she does.

Halfway through the first hymn, the back door opened, and somebody slid into the last pew on the left. I turned my head and it was Rory.

He had not been to church since Daddy’s funeral. He sat in the back with his hat on his knee, and he didn’t sing, but he stood when everybody stood.

After the service he was gone before I could get to the door.

But the preacher’s wife told me he had put an envelope in the plate. She didn’t say what was in it and I didn’t ask.

That afternoon there were more pictures. The Smithsonian. The Capitol steps. Arlington, where the kids stood in a line and watched the changing of the guard with their hands on their hearts.

Nell was in the front of that line. She had told me before she left that she was going to stand in the front at Arlington, for her Papaw, who served in the Army before he went in the mines.

The bus comes home

The bus was due back Tuesday at three in the afternoon. I traded the last two hours of my shift with my floor lead and was in the school lot by a quarter till.

It was a warm day, the warmest of the spring. The hills were full green now and the dogwoods were done, and the mamas stood around in their shirtsleeves talking about how quiet their houses had been.

At ten after three the bus came around the bend by the church.

Everybody started waving before it even turned in, and you could see the kids pressed up to the windows waving back.

That was when I saw Rory’s truck. It was parked at the far end of the lot under the maple tree, where the bus drivers park. I hadn’t seen it pull in.

He was sitting in the cab with the window down. Nobody had asked him to come. He had come anyway.

The bus pulled up to the front walk and the door folded open, and the kids came down the steps one at a time, tired and sunburned and loud.

Nell was the ninth one off. I counted. She had her backpack on and her binder under one arm, and her other hand was closed tight in a fist, like she was holding something she was afraid to drop.