I read the summons in the driver seat of my bus with the engine off and the sun coming up pink over the Winnebago River, and my son sat in the first row where the little ones sit and watched me read it. The Buick had been stopped on Highway 18 at one in the morning, three weeks before he took my keys. A trooper had given the driver a breath test. The number on the paper was 0.08, and the name of the driver was Brandon.
“I was not at your house that night,” he said. “I took the spare key from under the kitchen drawer on Thanksgiving weekend. Remember when you were at church? I borrowed the car to go to the casino with a friend, because mine was in the shop.” He swallowed. “I had two drinks too many. I was stopped. They let me call a ride, and the Buick went to the impound lot. I paid the fee, and I have been lying to everybody ever since.”
I turned in the seat of the bus and looked at him. He was forty eight years old with gray in his beard, and he looked like the boy who once ran into the road after a ball. I said nothing for a long minute. My first feeling was not anger. It was a quiet, enormous sorrow. All those weeks I had thought I was being punished for my age. He had been punishing himself, and doing it in the cruelest way, by pretending to protect me.
“The reason you took my keys,” I said slowly, “was so I would not find out about the stop.” He nodded. “And the Buick for sale?” He lowered his head. “To pay the lawyer and the fine. I figured if I sold it before you checked the title, you would never see the trooper report. I told myself you did not need it anyway.” He was crying now, quietly, with his big hands hanging between his knees. “I am so ashamed, Mom. I did it all wrong.”
An honest confession, even a late one, is the first honest mile on a road that began in the wrong direction.
I started the bus and drove the route, because forty two children were waiting at their stops, and no apology is worth making a child late to school. Brandon rode behind me for the whole run, in the front seat, with his coat borrowed from the back of the barn. At every stop he stood and helped the little ones up the steps. A boy named Caleb asked who he was. “I am the son of the driver,” Brandon said. “I am learning.”
At the end of the route, we sat in the empty bus in the school lot with the heater running. I told him what I expected. He would plead guilty in court on Friday, without excuses. He would complete every condition the judge set. He would tell Courtney and the children the truth, tonight, at the kitchen table. And he would not ask me to cover for him or pay for him. I would sit in the courtroom with him, I said, because that is what mothers do. But I would not stand in front of him.
The courtroom in Mason City was small and smelled of floor wax. Brandon stood at the table in a borrowed tie. The judge was a tall woman with reading glasses on a chain, and she listened to the prosecutor with great attention. When it was the turn of Brandon, he said, “Your Honor, I did what the report says. I put other people at risk, and I put the car of my mother at risk, and I lied about it. I have no excuse.” The judge looked at him for a long moment. “That is the first honest thing I have heard this week,” she said.
The sentence was fair and exact. A fine, the cost of the impound, a suspended license for a period, a class on alcohol and driving, and a year of probation. The prosecutor also confirmed, at my request, that since the Buick was registered to me and had been taken without my knowledge, no charge fell on me. The judge recommended that Brandon complete a substance evaluation. I did not need to be asked. I had already found the number for the clinic in Mason City.
Courtney cried when she heard, but she did not leave. She sat with Brandon on the couch every evening for a week, and she went with him to the first class. She told me quietly that she had suspected something was wrong for a year. I told her it was not her fault. The two of them sold their second truck to pay the lawyer, and Brandon began taking the city bus to work. On Fridays after the class he came to the bus barn and washed my windshield without being asked.
I never sold the Buick. I took it out of the impound lot myself, with a hundred and twenty dollars of my own money, and drove it home. The medal of St. Christopher still swung from the rearview mirror. I sat in the driveway for a while with my hands on the wheel, thinking of Gene in his father pickup, in the middle of a cornfield, telling me I had good instincts. Then I opened the garage and parked the Buick in its place.
In the spring, the judge reinstated his license on schedule. Brandon asked if he could drive my Buick for the first time with me beside him. We went out Route 6 past the river, slowly, in the soft afternoon light. He kept both hands on the wheel. At the four way stop where Tyler once watched me yield to a jogger, he came to a full stop, looked both ways twice, and glanced at me. “Perfect,” I said. He grinned like a boy of ten. I put my hand on the dashboard, and I let him drive.