The Drawings Behind the Stop Sign

I did the money in my head too, because I am a deli woman and I count. Sixteen dollars and twenty cents an hour, two hours a day, a hundred and eighty days.

It was not much, but it was mine, and it had gotten me up every morning for six years.

I would be giving up the pay, and the plaque, and the only hour of the day when I saw my grandson. I wanted to understand what I was paying before I paid it.

Friday was the last day of school, a half day. It was a clear, bright morning with a sky as blue as a pair of overalls.

I got there a quarter after seven and set my thermos at the base of the lamp post. And then I did something I had not done in six years.

I walked down to the back of the stop sign on the Quarry Street side. I crouched on my bad knees and looked at what had been behind me all that time.

There was a drawing taped to the back of the pole, down low, at the height of a ten-year-old’s hand. The tape was still shiny.

It showed the corner of Church and Quarry drawn from above like a map, with a stick figure in an orange vest in the middle of the road. Above her, in square letters, he had written, “Good morning Grandma.”

Under it was a smaller line. “Last day. Have a good summer.”

I put my hand flat on the pavement to keep from tipping over. I did not take it down. It was his, and it was for the next morning I would not be there to read it.

Then I stood up and went back to my road, because it was twenty-five past seven and the children were coming.

They came in a loud, giddy last-day wave, with their backpacks empty and their arms full of posters and art projects and stuffed animals.

I took them across a pack at a time. Annalouise, in the fourth grade now, hugged my waist and left a smear of chocolate milk on my vest.

Ottline came across with her hands cupped around something small and green and said, “It’s a toad. His name is Judge.” I laughed, which I had not done at that crossing in a year.

Sabeth was on the Quarry Street curb in her work scrubs, and Annalouise’s father, and a short crowd of mothers who always stood and talked there at the end of the day.

Sergeant Vetter’s cruiser sat across the street in the Sheetz lot. He had his window down.

I stopped the traffic one more time and walked the last of them across. Braylin was in that last group, in a gray t-shirt, with a piece of notebook paper folded in his back pocket.

I did not look above his head. I looked at his face. Neither of us said anything. When he reached the far curb, I held my arm up and kept the traffic stopped a little longer than I needed to.

Then I let the road go and stepped up onto the Quarry Street curb, where I had never once stood in six years, in front of every mother and child who was left.