6:20 A.M.
At 6:20 that morning, the bus barn door rolled up for the last time.
It made the same sound it always made. A long metal groan and a rattle, chains running up through the pulleys, and then cold gray light spilling in across the concrete floor. The smell of diesel and old vinyl seats. The radio in the dispatch office playing the farm report, low.
Eleven yellow buses in a row, nose to the door. Number 7 was third from the left.
My father climbed up into the driver’s seat the way he’d done every school morning for three years. One hand on the grab rail. One foot on the step. A little grunt as he pulled himself up.
I was in the first seat behind him.
Dad didn’t know why I’d taken the morning off.
I’d told him I wanted to ride along. Just once. Before he retired. I told him I’d always wondered what his route looked like.
He looked at me funny when I said it. He knows me. He knows I don’t take days off. I’ve worked at the Sioux County Treasurer’s office in Orange City for nineteen years, and I can count on one hand the sick days I’ve used.
But he didn’t ask questions. He just said, “Bring a coat. Heater’s slow.”
He wore the tan zip-up jacket he’s had since before Mom died.
It’s a Carhartt. Faded almost white at the elbows and the cuffs. One pocket torn and sewed back up with brown thread, crooked, by Mom, the winter before she got sick. He won’t wear anything else. My husband, Kent, bought him a new one two Christmases ago. It’s still in the box in his closet with the tags on.
He had his reading glasses in the chest pocket and a thermos of coffee in the cup holder and his lunch in a brown paper sack. Same as every day.
He put the key in. He checked his mirrors. Left, right, the big convex one over the windshield.
Then he turned around in his seat and looked at me.
“Last one, Jillie,” he said.
“Last one, Dad.”
He turned back around. He started the engine.
My father’s name is Harold DeBoer. Everybody calls him Hal. He was seventy-nine years old that morning. He farmed four hundred acres of corn and beans in Sioux County, Iowa, for fifty-one years, on the same ground his father farmed, and his father before that.
He retired from farming at seventy-three. He sold the land to the neighbor boy. He put the money in the bank. He was going to take Mom to see the Grand Canyon. She’d always wanted to see it.
She got sick that fall. Ovarian cancer. She was gone in fourteen months.
They never went.
