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 the whole thing out for him.
Because that clipboard man of a transportation director, so keen to run the old drivers off cheap, never bothered to check the one record that would have ended it in a minute. Who actually had my bus the day that 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 I was on my day off when that fuel card ran short, and a substitute had my bus, which meant the shortage was never mine and never could have been.
The union rep read that log, and then he looked at me, and he said the director had not just been wrong. He had signed a complaint against my license with the state built on a lie a child could have seen through.
The union moved fast. They took the log to the school board and to the state, and the complaint fell apart the moment anyone read the dates.
The breakfast was Friday, school board and all, orange juice and a plaque. When the director rose to say his piece about my thirty-four years, the union rep stood up first and asked the board to hear one thing before the man said another word.
He read the log aloud. The date. The substitute. The plain fact that I was nowhere near that bus.
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 yet, because somebody has to keep the snacks behind the seat for the hungry ones.
I thought a long while, that first dark night, about just signing the paper and going quiet. That is what a man like that counts on, that an old worker is too tired or too proud or too afraid to fight, and will slink off 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 going to hand mine to a stranger over a thing I never did.
Thirty-four years I got other people children home safe, and they tried to end me over a couple tanks of gas on my day off. It turned out the union, and a logbook, got me home safe too, when a clipboard man tried to run me off the road.