He pulled Number 7 out of the barn into the cold morning. The tires crunched on the gravel. The sky was pink in the east over the windbreak.
He reached up and flipped on the radio. The country station out of Sioux Center. George Strait.
Then he drove out the gate and turned north toward Route 7.
He didn’t know what was waiting for him. I’d made sure of that.
I sat in the first seat behind him with my hands in my lap and my heart pounding and didn’t say anything at all.
Chapter Two: The Yellow Legal Pad
To understand why my seventy-nine-year-old father was driving a school bus, you have to know about Neal.
Neal is my older brother. He’s fifty-two. Three years older than me. He has Dad’s height and Mom’s laugh and a way of talking that makes you feel like he’s letting you in on a secret.
He’s a car salesman. A good one. Maybe the best in Sioux County. He could sell a minivan to a man with no kids and make him feel like he got a deal.
In 2019, he opened his own lot. Hollandale Auto Sales, on Highway 75 on the south edge of Hollandale. Used cars and trucks. A little white sales office with a flag on top and balloons tied to the antennas.
It did all right the first two years. Then 2022 came.
Interest rates went up. Way up. Used car prices crashed after the big spike. Neal had financed his inventory on what’s called a floor plan, a line of credit from a bank in Sioux Falls, and when the prices dropped, the cars on his lot were suddenly worth less than he owed on them.
He was upside down by about sixty thousand dollars. The bank wanted it by June. Or they’d pull the floor plan and take his inventory.
He didn’t tell anybody. Not his wife, Shelly. Not me. Not Dad.
He just went to Dad’s house on a Sunday afternoon in March and sat down at the kitchen table.
I wasn’t there. I know because Dad told me later. Much later.
Neal asked to borrow thirty-eight thousand dollars. From Dad’s retirement. From the land money.
Dad had about a hundred and twelve thousand dollars in savings back then. After the land sale and Mom’s medical bills and the funeral. That was it. That was everything. He had Social Security, eighteen hundred a month, and no pension. Farmers don’t get pensions.
Thirty-eight thousand was a third of everything he had in the world.
He said yes before Neal finished asking.
Neal wrote the loan on a yellow legal pad. In 2022.
I’ve seen it. It’s one page. In Neal’s handwriting, blue ink, slanting to the right the way his writing always has.
I, Neal DeBoer, borrow $38,000 from my father, Harold DeBoer, to be repaid in full within two years, by March 31, 2024.
Neal’s signature at the bottom. Dad’s signature next to it.
Two years, it says.
It’s still in Dad’s kitchen drawer with the rubber bands.
The drawer to the left of the sink. Where Mom kept rubber bands and twist ties and birthday candles and the warranty for the dishwasher. Dad never cleaned it out after she died. He just kept putting things in.
The yellow legal pad note is folded in thirds, on top of a tangle of rubber bands. I found it in January, looking for a pen. I unfolded it and read it standing at his kitchen counter.
March 31, 2024. Two years.
It was January 2025.
I asked Dad about it that day. Standing in his kitchen, holding it.
He took it out of my hand. He folded it back up in thirds. He put it back in the drawer, on top of the rubber bands. He shut the drawer.
“Has he paid any of it?” I asked.
Dad didn’t answer.
“Dad. Has Neal paid you back one dime?”
He looked out the window over the sink. At the yard. At the bird feeder Mom put up in 1987.
“He’s had a hard time,” he said.
“That’s not what I asked.”
“No,” Dad said quietly. “He hasn’t.”
Chapter Three: For Something to Do
At seventy-six, Dad went back to driving bus.
He’d driven school bus once before. When I was a kid. In the winters, when the farm was slow, he drove Route 3 for the Hollandale Community School District to make a little extra money. He did it for eight years. He loved it.
In 2022, the summer after he loaned Neal the money, the district put an ad in the Sioux County Index-Reporter. School bus drivers needed. Will train. Must have CDL with passenger and school bus endorsements.
Dad went down to the bus barn and filled out the application.
“For something to do,” he told everyone.
That’s what he said. At church. At the café in Hollandale. At the Casey’s, when the woman at the register asked him why on earth a man his age wanted to drive a school bus.
“For something to do,” he said. “Gets lonely in that house. I like the kids.”
He went to Sioux City and got his commercial driver’s license renewed. He passed the written test. He passed the road test in a borrowed bus. He passed the Department of Transportation physical at the clinic in Orange City, which they make you do every single year after you turn seventy.
The district gave him Route 7. The longest one. Fifty-eight miles of gravel roads, out through the farm country north of Hollandale. Thirty-one stops. Forty-four kids.
I knew it wasn’t for something to do.
I knew because I do the property tax rolls for Sioux County. I see every tax bill in the county. And I saw Dad’s.
In 2023, he paid his property taxes late. In two installments. He’d never paid late in his life. Not once in fifty-one years of farming.
In 2024, he let his car insurance lapse for a month. I only found out because the Iowa DOT sent him a letter and he left it on his kitchen table.
He stopped buying the good coffee. He started buying the store brand in the big red can. He turned the heat down to sixty-two in the winter. He stopped going out to eat with his friends from church on Thursdays.
The district paid him nineteen dollars and forty cents an hour. Two runs a day, morning and afternoon. About twelve hundred dollars a month during the school year.
Kent and I offered to cover the money ourselves.
We sat him down at his own kitchen table in February. Kent and me. We’d talked about it for weeks. We didn’t have thirty-eight thousand dollars lying around. Kent’s a manager at the feed mill in Sioux Center. I work at the treasurer’s office. We’ve got two kids in college and a mortgage.
But we could take a home equity loan. We’d figured it out. We could give Dad the thirty-eight thousand, and he could quit driving that bus, and we’d sort it out with Neal ourselves.
Dad listened. Then he shook his head.
“No,” he said.
“Dad…”
“I won’t take a cent, Jillie,” he said. “Not from you. Not from Kent. You’ve got your own kids to look after.”
“Then let me talk to Neal,” I said.
Dad looked at me across the table. That look. The one he used to give me when I was twelve and wanted to fight a boy at school.
“No,” he said.
“Dad, he owes you thirty-eight thousand dollars. You’re seventy-nine years old and driving a school bus in a blizzard. Somebody has to say something to him.”
“Nobody has to say anything,” Dad said. “It was my money. It was my choice to lend it. And it’s his business to pay it back. Not yours.”
“But…”
“Jill.” He put his hand flat on the table. “Promise me. Promise me you won’t fight your brother over this. I won’t have my kids fighting over money. Not after your mother.”
I sat there for a long time.
“Promise me,” Dad said again.
“I promise,” I said.
It was Dad’s money and Dad’s choice to lend it.
And he made me promise not to fight my brother.
So I didn’t. I didn’t call Neal. I didn’t drive to his car lot. I didn’t say one word to his wife or his kids or anybody at church.
But I couldn’t just sit there either.
All I could do was make sure the county saw what he’d been carrying. Not the money. Him. Three years of five a.m. mornings on gravel roads. Forty-four kids. Thirty-one stops.
Chapter Four: His Hand on the Lever
In January, his hand shook so hard on the door lever it took him two tries.
I saw it. I’d driven out to the bus barn on a Friday afternoon to bring him a casserole. I was sitting in my car in the parking lot when Number 7 came in from the afternoon run.
He pulled into the barn. He set the brake. He reached for the lever that opens the door.
His hand shook. Bad. Like a leaf in the wind. He missed the lever. He reached again. On the second try, he got it.
The door folded open. He came down the steps slowly, one hand on the grab rail. He saw my car and waved.
He didn’t know I’d seen.
I called Dr. Haverkamp at the clinic in Orange City that night. She’s been Dad’s doctor for twenty years.
“I can’t tell you anything about his health, Jill,” she said. “You know that. Privacy rules.”
“I know. I just need to know if he’s safe. Driving forty-four kids around on gravel roads.”
She was quiet for a long time.
“He passed his DOT physical in August,” she said carefully. “He’ll need another one this August. Whether he passes it depends on a lot of things.” She paused. “I’ll tell you what I tell everybody. Seventy-nine is old for that job. Hands get tired.”
In March, he told the district this was his last year.
He didn’t tell me first. I found out from the transportation director, Marv Schuiteman, who goes to our church.
“Your dad came in today,” Marv said after the service, in the narthex. “Said he’s done in May. Last day of school.” He shook his head. “I’ve got nobody to replace him. Nobody wants Route 7. Fifty-eight miles of gravel.”
“Did he say why?”
“Said his hands are tired,” Marv said. “Said he didn’t want to be the old man who put a bus in the ditch with kids on it.”