One girl cried in the back seat every morning. I never asked why—but I always waited. Her name was Jenny, with pigtails that bounced when she ran, and eyes that carried a weight no ten-year-old should know.
She’d climb aboard my old yellow bus, number 47, slip to the back, and let the tears fall like they’d been trapped all night. I’d adjust my rearview mirror, not to spy, but to make sure she was okay.
Twenty-five years driving the kids of Mill Creek, and you learn to see without looking, to care without saying.
Back in the ’70s, when I started, Mill Creek was a different place. The paper mill puffed smoke like a proud dragon, and every other house had a dad who punched a clock there.
Moms baked pies for the church social, and kids played kickball in the street till the streetlights flickered on. My bus route wound through gravel roads and past fields where corn stood taller than the boys who’d sneak out to smoke behind it.
The kids I drove—grubby, loud, full of dreams—were the heartbeat of this town. I wasn’t just their driver. I was their alarm clock, their confessor, their guardrail.
The bus smelled of pencil shavings and bologna sandwiches. Vinyl seats cracked under the weight of growing kids, and the AM radio crackled Johnny Cash or Tammy Wynette when the chatter died down.
I’d hear everything—first crushes, fistfights, fears about Dad’s drinking or Mom’s late shifts at the diner. I didn’t judge. I listened.
Sometimes, I’d toss a kid a peppermint from the stash in my glovebox. “Chin up, Tommy,” I’d say. “Tomorrow’s a new day.” They’d smile, and I’d feel like I’d won something bigger than the $1.75 an hour the school district paid me.
Jenny was different. In ’85, when she started riding, Mill Creek was already changing. The mill had shut down, leaving half the town jobless.
Pickup trucks rusted in driveways, and the diner swapped homemade pies for frozen ones. Jenny’s dad was a Vietnam vet, folks whispered, haunted by things he never spoke of.
Her mom worked double shifts at the new Walmart thirty miles away. Jenny’s tears weren’t loud, but they were steady, like a leak you can’t fix. One morning, I slipped her a peppermint.
She took it, held it tight, and whispered, “Thanks, Miss Ruth.” That was the first time she spoke to me. I didn’t push. I just kept waiting.
The years rolled on, and so did my bus. I drove kids who became parents, then drove their kids. I saw the town shrink as factories closed and families left.
By the ’90s, cell phones started appearing, tiny bricks the rich kids flaunted. The internet came, too, promising to connect us all, but it felt like it just pulled people apart. Kids stopped talking as much, their eyes glued to screens.
The gravel roads got paved, but the potholes in people’s lives got deeper.
I remember Bobby, a wiry kid in ’92, who’d sit upfront and tell me he’d join the Army like his dad. “Gonna make him proud, Miss Ruth,” he’d say, clutching a dog-eared letter from his father, stationed in Desert Storm.
Bobby did enlist, right after 9/11. He came back, but not whole. I’d see him at the VFW, staring into his beer like he was still out there in the sand. I gave him a peppermint once, for old times’ sake.
He laughed, but it was hollow. “You’re still saving us, Miss Ruth,” he said. I didn’t feel like a savior. I just drove.
The school district changed, too. Budget cuts meant fewer buses, longer routes. By 2010, they were talking about “efficiency.” Fancy word for firing folks like me.
They brought in GPS systems and cameras, said it was safer. Safer than what? A woman who knew every kid’s name, every curve in the road?
I’d driven through blizzards, dodged deer, and once stopped a fight with nothing but a glare and a “Sit down, now.” But numbers don’t care about heart. In 2015, they told me my route was “redundant.”
Redundant. Like I was a cog in a machine, not a person who’d carried a generation of kids on her back.
My last day, I drove slow. The bus was half-empty—fewer kids, more houses boarded up. Jenny was long gone, married, moved to the city. Bobby was still around, working odd jobs.
The new kids had earbuds, staring at phones like they held the secrets of the universe. Nobody waved when they got off. I parked the bus, handed in my keys, and that was that.
Nobody threw a party. Nobody said goodbye. The next morning, a shiny new bus with a younger driver took my route. I stood on my porch, coffee gone cold, watching it pass. It didn’t stop for anyone.
Now, at sixty-eight, I sit in my kitchen, radio tuned to the oldies station. The mill’s a skeleton, rusted and quiet. The diner’s gone, replaced by a gas station with a touchscreen to order your coffee.
Kids don’t play in the streets anymore; they’re inside, lost in their games. I think about Jenny, Bobby, and all the others. I wonder if they remember the bus, the peppermint, the way I waited. I wonder if they know how much they meant to me.
I walk past the school sometimes, see the new buses with their blinking lights and fancy tech. They’re efficient, sure, but they don’t know the kids.
They don’t know that Jenny’s tears stopped the day she brought me a daisy from her yard, or that Bobby saluted me when he got his draft card. They don’t know that driving a bus wasn’t just a job—it was a promise. To be there. To wait. To care.
Yesterday, I found an old peppermint wrapper in a coat pocket. It crinkled in my hand, and I could almost hear the hum of the engine, the chatter of kids, the squeak of brakes.
I closed my eyes and saw Jenny in the back, not crying anymore, but smiling, holding that daisy. I saw Bobby, young and proud, dreaming of honor. I saw them all, my kids, carrying their hopes and hurts onto my bus, trusting me to get them home.
The world moves on, faster now, all screens and speed. But some things don’t change. Not the weight of a child’s trust. Not the pride of a job well done. Not the ache of being forgotten.
I wasn’t just the bus driver. I was their last safe space. And I’d wait for them again, if they’d only let me.
