The Half Mile to the School Bus

I did not say anything.

“I thought you waited,” she said. “I thought you waited till he died. Pete told me what Lavon said. I didn’t believe him the first day. I believed him by Sunday.”

“He liked your horses on that strip,” I said. “We both did. That’s why we waited nine years.”

She nodded. She took one hand out of her pocket and laid it on Pete’s brace post, on the top of it, where the frost was.

“I was alone with those horses all spring and all summer,” she said, “and I’d look over at that grass where Lavon used to stand with them, and then one day there was a fence on it, and I just…” She stopped. “That’s no reason. That boy missed school. That’s no reason in the world.”

“No,” I said. “It isn’t.”

I said it gently. But I said it. Because it was true, and she needed somebody to say it, and she needed it to be me.

She nodded again. She did not argue. The bus came over the rise. I could hear it gearing down.

“I’ll move it today,” Vonda said. “I’ll move it this afternoon. Dorothea can come up the lane tomorrow.”

“All right,” I said.

Eli tugged my hand. “Can Vonda walk us to the bus?”

Vonda looked at me. And I looked at her. And I thought about what Lavon would have wanted, standing on that strip of grass with his cap pushed back.

“If she wants to,” I said.

So the three of us walked the last fifty feet to the blacktop. Eli held my hand on one side and, after a minute, he reached up with the other mitten and took Vonda’s. She let him.

The bus stopped. The red lights came on. Dorothea opened the door and looked at the three of us standing there in the frost, and for once she did not wave at the house.

She did not need to. Vonda was standing right there.

“Morning, Vonda,” Dorothea said.

“Morning, Dorothea,” Vonda said, and her voice only shook a little.

Eli climbed on. He went to his seat on our side and pressed his mitten on the glass, and Vonda raised her hand to him, and the bus went on over the rise.

The Trailer

Vonda moved the trailer that afternoon. I was asleep when she did it. When I walked down at three thirty to meet the bus, the mouth of the lane was empty, just two rectangles of brown grass where the tires had sat for a month, and the frost was coming back over them.

Friday morning Dorothea turned in off the blacktop and came the whole half mile up the lane to our yard and turned around by the propane tank the way she had for two years.

Eli got on the bus in the yard.

He was quiet that afternoon when he got home. At supper he pushed his peas around on his plate.

“What’s wrong, honey?” I said.

“I didn’t get to count the posts,” he said.