…”the person who never stopped waiting for me to say it.”
He took a long breath. His mother kept one hand on his shoulder. The whole cafeteria was silent. Even Brent had lowered his phone.
“Thank you, Miss Carol,” he said. “For every morning.”
Five words. It took him almost a minute.
My mom put both hands over her mouth.
His name was Marcus. He’s twenty now. He rode my mother’s bus from the time he was six until he was eighteen, every morning, every afternoon. He’s autistic and has a speech disorder, and for most of those years, he didn’t speak at all. Other aides had requested to be moved off his route because he’d scream when the bus started. My mom asked to keep him.
His mother told the rest, because Marcus was done talking for a while, and that was okay.
“Carol sat next to him every single day for twelve years,” she said. “She hummed the same song every morning so he’d know the bus was safe. She learned to sign so she could talk to him. She told him once, when he was fourteen, that if he ever learned to say ‘thank you’ out loud, he should say it first to someone who’d been waiting to hear it. He’s been practicing in the mirror for six months.”
My mom got up. She walked to the back of the cafeteria and knelt down in front of Marcus’s wheelchair, so she was looking up at him, the way she’d done on that bus a thousand times. And then she signed something to him. He laughed, a big, loud laugh that echoed off the ceiling.
“What did she say?” someone whispered.
His mother wiped her eyes. “She said, ‘Took you long enough.'”
The whole room laughed, and then everyone was crying. All of the bus drivers. The principal. The lunch ladies.
Brent was standing by the window with his phone. He didn’t post the video he’d filmed earlier. I watched him delete it. Later, he walked up to my mom and asked, a little awkwardly, what she’d been humming on the bus all those years. She told him. It was “Here Comes the Sun.”
He went quiet. Then he said, “That’s a good song.”
My mother now volunteers on Marcus’s new bus, to his adult day program, one morning a week. She says she’s retired. Marcus says she’s “part-time.” She hums the whole way.
