What the superintendent had asked him in the lot on Tuesday, hat in his hand, was how many kids. Roy said he’d never counted, and then he stood there and did it anyway — sixty a day, a hundred eighty days, thirty-eight years — and the man wrote the number on the back of a fuel log. Then he asked what Roy would want if anybody ever asked, and Roy said the heater on 12 has never worked right and there are kids on that route sitting in coats in January, and that was his entire list.
At 3:40 Friday, forty-one buses stopped in that lot in a line and didn’t pull into their spaces. Then every driver opened their door at once. That’s all it was. Forty-one doors, the same sound Roy has made forty times a morning for thirty-eight years, and the superintendent came over the radio on the district channel and read out the number — four hundred and ten thousand, give or take — and said that was how many times a child had gotten on a bus in this county because Roy Petrosky showed up.
He was still in the driver’s seat of 27 with his hands on the wheel. He didn’t get out for a good while. When he did, there were parents along the fence — some of them people he’d driven himself in the eighties, standing there with their own kids — and a woman in her forties who told him he’d waited for her at the end of a driveway in 1991 on a morning her mother had left and he’d said nothing about it, just waited, every day that week.
The transportation director stayed by the dispatch door. Nobody said a word to him. Roy walked over at the end and handed in the fob exactly as instructed, and said there you go, chief. The superintendent handed him a new one about a minute later, off a different ring — full hours restored, benefits reinstated Monday, backdated. Bus 12 went into the shop that weekend. It has heat now.
