The Bus Driver Who Bought Her House

“I know a bus driver can’t come up with that kind of money, Lori.” Dale Rasmussen said it on my front step with his hat in one hand and a folded letter in the other.

He didn’t say it to be cruel. I want that understood from the start. He said it the way a man says it looks like rain, like it was a plain fact he was sorry to be the one to report.

It was the last Monday in September. I had just come in from my afternoon route and still had the smell of diesel and wet sneakers on me. The maple in the side yard was starting to turn at the top.

“Man from Omaha sent me this,” Dale said, and held up the letter. “Buys old houses, fixes them up, sells them again. He’ll pay eighty nine thousand cash for this place. Close in two weeks if I want.”

I stood there with my keys still in my hand. I had rented that white one story house on the corner of Third and Elm from Dale Rasmussen for eighteen years.

“I’m giving you first chance,” he said. “Same price. You’ve been a good renter. You get thirty days to come up with it, and if you can’t, I sign with him and you’ll have till the end of the year to find a place.”

Then he looked down at the step between us and let out a long breath, and that was when he said the thing about the bus driver.

I didn’t say anything back. I have driven a school bus for nineteen years, and you learn on a bus that the fastest way to lose a fight is to answer the first thing somebody throws at you.

“Thirty days,” I said finally. “Starting today?”

“Starting today,” Dale said. He put his hat back on. “I’m sorry, Lori. I am. It’s just where things are.”

He walked back to his Buick at the curb. I watched him go, and I noticed, like you notice a tooth that is missing, the two bare hooks in the porch ceiling where the swing used to hang.

Dale had come and taken that swing down two Saturdays before. He said the chains were rusting through and he didn’t want anybody getting hurt. I had thanked him for it. I had even made him a cup of coffee.

Now I stood on the porch and understood that he had been getting the house ready for somebody else.

I went inside and sat at the kitchen table for a long time without turning on the light.

My kitchen is small. The linoleum is the same pattern of tan squares it was when I moved in, and there is a soft spot in front of the sink that I have stood on through probably ten thousand dishes.

The pantry is just off the kitchen, a narrow closet with a door that sticks in August. On the inside of that door frame, in pencil, are eighteen years of my children.

Tyler at four, at five, at six, all the way to the top, where he finally had to bend down so I could reach his head. Morgan in purple marker the year she insisted on purple. Jess in a cluster of lines so close together you can barely read them, because she wanted to be measured every week the summer she turned nine.