The Morning the School Bus Didn’t Come

Rochelle’s Night Shift

Rochelle Moss got home at 8:05 that morning with her feet aching and her scrubs smelling of hospital disinfectant and her phone full of voicemails she had not had a chance to check.

She had worked nights in the cardiac unit at Phoebe Putney in Albany for nine years. It was a good job, the best job anyone in her family had ever had, and it paid for the house on Persimmon Road and the car and the braces Jaylen was going to need next year. But it meant she was gone from seven at night to seven in the morning three days a week, and on those days, Jaylen was the man of the house. She hated it. She did it anyway. That was what being a single mother in rural Georgia meant: you did the things you hated because there was no one else to do them.

She listened to the first voicemail standing in the kitchen. Mama, the bus didn’t come. We’re still at the stop. I don’t know what to do.

She stopped breathing. She played it again. The time stamp said 7:15. It was 8:06 now. Her children had been standing at the end of a dirt road alone for over an hour, and she had not known.

The second voicemail was from Odessa Greer. Rochelle, it’s Miss Odessa. I’ve got your babies. They’re safe. I’ll explain later. Don’t you worry.

Rochelle sat down at the kitchen table and put her face in her hands and cried for about thirty seconds, the way she sometimes did at the end of a hard shift, quickly and efficiently. Then she wiped her eyes and went out to the mailbox.

It took her ten minutes to find the letter. It had come on Wednesday, it turned out, and it had been sitting in the pile of mail on the passenger seat of her car with the power bill and three credit card offers and a seed catalog addressed to the previous owner. A plain white envelope with the school district’s return address. She opened it standing in the driveway.

She read it twice. Then she read it a third time, more slowly, because the first two times her eyes had kept skipping over the same line. Students formerly served by Route 31 will be served by a consolidated stop at the intersection of Persimmon Road and U.S. Highway 280. Pickup time: 6:15 a.m.

Rochelle knew that intersection. She drove through it every night on her way to Albany. Every night, she slowed down and held her breath, because the logging trucks came over the rise on 280 so fast and so heavy that the wind of their passing rocked her little car on its springs. There was no shoulder. There was a drainage ditch on either side full of blackberry brambles and broken glass. There was no light. At 6:15 in the morning in December, it would still be pitch dark.

Four miles from her front door.

She thought about Kiara, who was seven and still sometimes forgot to look both ways in the driveway. She thought about Jaylen, who was eleven and responsible and would try to hold his sister’s hand the whole way. She imagined them walking along the edge of Highway 280 in the dark with the logging trucks coming, and she had to put her hand on the mailbox post to steady herself.

She could not drive them. She would be in Albany until seven. Her own mother was in a nursing home in Valdosta. Her neighbors were all in the same situation she was. Everybody on Persimmon Road worked. That was why they lived on Persimmon Road. It was what they could afford.

She went back inside and got her phone and started calling.

By noon, she had talked to eleven families on Route 31. Four of them had gotten the letter. Seven had not. Two families had sent their children to the consolidated stop that morning, and both had stood at the highway in the dark for almost an hour before a bus came, and one little boy had slipped in the ditch and come home with a gash on his knee from a broken bottle. Mrs. Ochoa did not understand the letter at all; her nephew had to translate it for her over the phone, and when he finished, she was quiet for a long time and then said something in Spanish that the nephew did not translate.

At two o’clock, Rochelle called the district transportation office. A recorded voice told her that all representatives were busy. At 2:30, she called again. At three o’clock, a tired man finally answered and told her that the decision was final and had been approved by the superintendent, Dr. Garrett Wheeler, as part of a plan to save the district three hundred and forty thousand dollars a year. He said that if she had concerns, she was welcome to speak during the public comment period at the next school board meeting.

“When is that?” Rochelle asked.

“The third Thursday of October,” the man said.

That was five weeks away.

Rochelle hung up and sat at her kitchen table for a long time. Then, at 3:40, she heard an old engine knocking its way down Persimmon Road, and she went out on the porch in time to see the white church van pull up at the live oak, and her children climb out of it, and Miss Odessa Greer wave at her from behind the cracked windshield.

Rochelle walked down to the road in her bare feet.

“Miss Odessa,” she said, and then she couldn’t say anything else.

“I know, baby,” Odessa said. “I know. Same time tomorrow.”