6:52 at the End of Persimmon Road

The school bus came to the end of Persimmon Road at 6:52 every morning, and it had for as long as anyone on Persimmon Road could remember. Jaylen Moss knew it the way he knew his own birthday. At 6:47, you heard it before you saw it, the low grumble of the diesel coming around the bend past the old Hendley peanut barn. At 6:50, the yellow roof appeared over the rise. At 6:52 exactly, the brakes sighed, the stop arm swung out with its little red sign, and the door folded open, and Miss Odessa Greer looked down at you from the driver’s seat and said, “Well, look what the cat drug in.”

She said it every single morning. She had said it to Jaylen’s mother, too, twenty-five years earlier, standing at the same red-dirt corner under the same live oak.

On the second Monday in September, Jaylen stood under the live oak with his little sister, Kiara, and listened for the bus. He was eleven, in the sixth grade, tall for his age and serious about it. Kiara was seven and serious about nothing. She was spinning in slow circles with her arms out, her backpack swinging around her like a satellite, singing a song she had made up about a frog.

The sun was just coming up over the pine plantation across the road, turning the morning mist gold. The air smelled like wet dirt and cut grass and the paper mill twenty miles off, which you could always smell when the wind came from the east. A mockingbird was going through its whole repertoire on the power line.

At 6:47, there was no grumble.

At 6:50, there was no yellow roof over the rise.

At 6:52, there was nothing at all. Just the mockingbird and the mist and Kiara singing about the frog.

Jaylen checked the watch his grandfather had given him, a big steel diver’s watch that slid around on his wrist. 6:53. 6:55. He felt something tighten in his stomach. In six years of riding the bus, he could remember Miss Odessa being late exactly twice. Once was the morning of the ice storm, when a pine tree came down across Mill Creek Road, and she was nine minutes late and furious about it. The other time was when a cow got out on the county road and she stopped the bus and got out and shooed it back through the fence herself, in her church shoes, while the whole bus cheered.

At 7:05, Kiara stopped spinning. “Where’s Miss Odessa?”

“I don’t know,” Jaylen said.

Their mother wasn’t home. She worked nights as a nurse at the hospital in Albany, three twelve-hour shifts a week, and she didn’t get back until nearly eight. On her work nights, Jaylen was in charge of getting himself and Kiara up, dressed, fed, and to the bus. He took it seriously. He had a list taped to the refrigerator. He had never once missed the bus.

At 7:15, he took out the old flip phone his mother made him carry and called her. It went straight to voicemail. She was probably with a patient. He left a message, trying to keep his voice steady. “Mama, the bus didn’t come. We’re still at the stop. I don’t know what to do.”

Down the road, he could see the next stop, a quarter mile away at the corner of Persimmon and Bethel Church Road. The three Ochoa kids were standing there too, small dark shapes in the gold mist, looking up the road the same way he was. Past them, he knew, there were nine more stops on Route 31, all the way out to the river. Twenty-two kids altogether, scattered along fourteen miles of dirt road and county blacktop, all of them waiting for a bus that wasn’t coming.

At 7:31, Kiara sat down in the red dirt and started to cry.

Jaylen sat down beside her and put his arm around her and tried to think. The school was eleven miles away in Tallow Creek. There was no way to walk it. He couldn’t leave her. He couldn’t call anyone but his mother, and his mother wasn’t answering.

Then, at 7:40, he heard an engine.

It was not the grumble of a diesel. It was higher, rougher, the sound of something old and gasoline-powered and not happy about being awake. Jaylen stood up and shaded his eyes and looked down Persimmon Road toward the peanut barn.

Coming around the bend, slowly, with its hazard lights blinking, was a white fifteen-passenger van. It had a crack across the windshield and a rust spot on the hood shaped like the state of Florida, and painted along its side in faded blue letters were the words Greater Mount Zion Missionary Baptist Church.

It pulled up beside the live oak and the driver’s window came down.

Miss Odessa Greer looked out at them, sixty-eight years old, in her church hat and her reading glasses and a cardigan buttoned wrong.

“Well,” she said. “Look what the cat drug in.”