The Morning the School Bus Didn’t Come

Two Trips Down Persimmon Road

The church van held fifteen people if they were friendly. Route 31 had twenty-two children.

Odessa had done the arithmetic sitting in the dark in the church parking lot at 5:30 in the morning, waiting for the van’s engine to warm up enough to stop knocking. She would have to make two trips. If she ran the river end first, the farthest-out children, and brought them in to the school, she could come back for the Persimmon Road children. It would make everyone late. The first group would be fifteen minutes late. The second group would be nearly an hour late. It would not be right. But it would be better than nothing.

She had not counted on the van being so slow, or on the river road being washed out from Saturday’s rain, or on having to stop at every single house on the route because the children were not standing at the stops. Many of them had not waited. When the bus didn’t come by 7:15, the older ones had walked back home, and some of them had gone back to bed.

So she went to every door. She knocked. She explained. At the Pickett house, out past the river bridge, a sleepy fourteen-year-old boy answered the door in his socks and stared at her, and she said, “Get your shoes on, Darnell, and don’t you dare give me that look.” At the Ochoa house, Mrs. Ochoa came out holding a baby and listened to Odessa’s halting Spanish and her own halting English, and the two women worked it out between them, and three more children climbed into the van. At the trailer behind the Hendley peanut barn, nobody answered at all, and Odessa stood on the cinder-block steps and knocked for a full minute before a small voice behind the door said, “Mama says not to open it for strangers.”

“Baby, it’s Miss Odessa,” she said. “I’m not a stranger. I’m the bus.”

The door opened.

By the time she reached the live oak at the end of Persimmon Road, where Jaylen Moss and his sister were waiting, it was 7:40, and the van already held fourteen children, and she had to ask Jaylen if he would mind riding up front on the console between the seats, because there was nowhere else to put him.

“Is that allowed?” Jaylen asked.

“No,” Odessa said. “Get in.”

She dropped the first load at Tallow Creek Elementary and Middle School at 8:22. Then she turned around and went back for the rest. By the time she pulled up in front of the school the second time, with the last eight children, it was 9:10. First period was nearly over.

The principal was standing on the front steps.

Her name was Dr. Celeste Haynes, and she had been principal at Tallow Creek for six years. She was a tall, careful woman with silver hair cut close to her head, and Odessa had always liked her. She was not smiling now. She waited while the children piled out of the van and went inside, the older ones steering the little ones, Jaylen holding Kiara’s hand. Then she walked down the steps to the driver’s window.

“Mrs. Greer,” she said quietly. “What is this?”

“These are my children,” Odessa said. “They didn’t have a way to school.”

Dr. Haynes closed her eyes for a moment. “I know about the route,” she said. “I argued against it. I want you to know that. I wrote a letter. But Odessa, you can’t do this. You don’t work for the district anymore. That van isn’t insured to transport students. If something happens, if one of these children gets hurt…” She stopped. “You can’t do this.”

Odessa looked at her. She looked at the school, at the flag snapping on the pole, at the faces of children watching from the classroom windows.

“Then tell me what I’m supposed to do,” she said. “Because they’re going to be standing at those stops again tomorrow morning. And the morning after that. And somebody has to come get them.”

“Then tell me what I’m supposed to do.”

Dr. Haynes didn’t answer.

“I’ll see you tomorrow, Principal,” Odessa said. “Around 8:20. And again around nine.”

She rolled up the window and drove away.