The Morning the School Bus Didn’t Come

What the Superintendent Said

For a long time, Dr. Garrett Wheeler did not say anything at all.

The whole room waited. Hollis Jenkins started to say something and then stopped. In the cafeteria next door, somebody coughed and was shushed. At the side table, the superintendent sat looking at the faded spiral notebook on the edge of the board’s table, and his jaw was working, and his hands were pressed flat against the tabletop as though he were holding himself in his chair.

Then he stood up. He walked to the board’s table, and he picked up the notebook, and he held it in both hands and looked at the page where his name was written in a young bus driver’s round, careful handwriting from thirty-eight years ago.

“I remember the coat,” he said.

His voice was very quiet. It did not sound like the voice that had given the slide presentation. It sounded much younger.

“It was green,” he said. “Corduroy. With a fleece collar. It came down to my knees. I wore it all that winter, and I wouldn’t let my aunt throw it away when I outgrew it. I think it’s still in a box in her attic in Valdosta.” He swallowed. “I remember the granola bars. Peanut butter. I remember you always gave me mine first, before anybody else got on, and I always thought it was because I was the first stop. I didn’t understand until I was grown that you did it so the other kids wouldn’t see.”

He looked up from the notebook, and across the room, and found Odessa in the front row.

“I remember the hospital,” he said. “And the planet book.”

Odessa nodded. She could not speak.

Garrett Wheeler set the notebook down very carefully on the table and turned to face the room. When he spoke again, his voice was steadier, but it was still not the voice of the slides.

“I owe this board and this community an explanation,” he said. “And I owe Mrs. Greer an apology.”

He told them. He said that when he left Tallow Creek at eleven, he had made a decision, the way children sometimes do, that he would never come back. He had grown up hungry in a trailer behind a peanut barn with a sick mother, and he had been ashamed of it, so ashamed that he had spent most of his life making sure nobody ever knew. He had gone to college on scholarship and then to graduate school, and he had built a career in big suburban districts where nobody knew where he came from. When the superintendent’s job in Tallow Creek County opened up four years earlier, he had told himself it was a career move. Rural districts were good experience. He would do it for a few years and move on.

“I told myself I didn’t remember the routes,” he said. “I told myself it was a long time ago. When the consultant brought me the map, I saw the red line on Route 31, and I saw Persimmon Road, and I knew exactly where it went. I knew. And I signed it anyway. Because the numbers said to, and because I didn’t want to look too closely at why it bothered me.” He paused. “I didn’t want to go back down that road. Not even on a map.”

He turned to the board.

“I am formally withdrawing my recommendation to discontinue Route 31,” he said. “Effective immediately. I’ll find the three hundred and forty thousand dollars somewhere else, starting with my own office budget. If I can’t, I’ll come back to this board and tell you so, and we’ll decide together, in public, with the families in the room.” He looked toward Rochelle. “And I’ll be asking the state transportation department for a traffic study at the intersection of Persimmon Road and Highway 280, whether we use that stop or not. No child in this county should have to walk that road. I should have seen that. I didn’t want to.”

Hollis Jenkins cleared his throat. “We’ll need a motion,” he said, a little unsteadily.

A board member made the motion. Another seconded it. The vote was five to nothing.

The room came apart.

People were standing and clapping and crying. The sheriff was hugging the pharmacist from Tifton. Mrs. Ochoa had both hands over her face. Jaylen Moss was on his feet on his chair with his clipboard held over his head like a trophy, and his mother was laughing and trying to get him down.

In the middle of all of it, Odessa Greer sat very still in the front row. Garrett Wheeler walked across the library to her, through the crowd, and stopped in front of her chair. For a moment he didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands.

Then he knelt down, the way a grown man kneels to talk to a child, so his face was level with hers.

“Would you drive it?” he asked. “Route 31? Would you come back?”

Odessa looked at him for a long moment. She looked at the gray suit and the blue tie and the careful haircut, and underneath all of it she saw a thin little boy in a green corduroy coat that came down to his knees, standing at the end of Persimmon Road with a library book clutched to his chest.

“Only on one condition,” she said.

“Anything.”

“The first morning,” Odessa said, “you ride along.”