Monday morning I did not drive to the depot. I drove to the union hall, to the old rep who had known me thirty years, and I laid it all out for him.
Because that numbers man of a transportation director, so keen to run the senior drivers off for cheaper, had made one mistake he never bothered to check. He never looked at who actually had my bus on the days that fuel card came up short.
The depot keeps a log of every bus and every driver, and when the union pulled it, it showed plain as day that on every single day the card ran short, my bus was assigned to somebody else, and I was nowhere near it, which meant the shortage was never mine and never could have been.
The union rep looked at that log, and then he looked at me, and he said the director had not just been wrong. He had signed a state complaint against my license built on a lie any child could have seen through in five minutes.
The union moved fast. They took the log to the school board and to the state, and the complaint against my license fell apart the moment anyone actually read the dates.
The breakfast was Friday. School board and all, orange juice and a plaque, everyone smiling. When the director stood to say his piece about my thirty-three years, the union rep stood up first, and he asked the board to hear one thing before the man said another word.
He read the log aloud. The dates. The drivers. The plain fact that I could not have taken what I was accused of taking.
The board went quiet, then angry, and not at me. The director had lied to them, and tried to pull an honest man license over it, and they had nearly let him. He did not keep his job the week out.
They cleared my record, restored my license, and asked me back to drive as long as I cared to. My hands are not what they were, but I will drive those children a while longer yet, because somebody has to keep the snacks behind the seat for the hungry ones.
I have thought a good deal, these last days, about how easy it would have been to just sign the paper and go. That is what they count on, men like that. That an old worker will be too tired, or too proud, or too afraid to fight, and will slink off quiet and let the lie stand. I nearly did. I am glad I did not. A name is the one thing you carry your whole life, and I was not about to let a stranger take mine over money I never touched.
Thirty-three years I got other people children home safe. It turned out the union, and a logbook, got me home safe too, when a numbers man tried to run me off the road.