Route 12 ran on time Monday through Wednesday and Friday. On Thursdays it was twenty minutes late, every week, and nobody could tell her why.
Tamsin Ogilvie starts writing the times down because she is tired of standing at the corner.
Monday, 3:34. Tuesday, 3:33. Wednesday, 3:35.
Thursday, 3:54.
Friday, 3:33.
She does it for four weeks before she says anything, because four weeks is when a coincidence stops being one.
Tamsin: Rory, does the bus stop anywhere extra on Thursdays?
Rory: Sometimes.
Tamsin: Where?
Rory: By the church.
Tamsin: Does somebody get off?
Rory: Marcus does. But he gets back on.
Tamsin looks at her son.
Tamsin: He gets back on?
Rory: Yeah. With a bag.
She calls the transport office on a Wednesday.
Hank: Route 12 runs on schedule, ma’am.
Tamsin: I have four Thursdays written down. 3:54, 3:52, 3:56, 3:53.
Hank: I’d have to look at the GPS.
Tamsin: Would you?
Hank: Ma’am, is your son getting home safely?
Tamsin: Every day. That’s not the question.
Hank: Then what is the question?
Tamsin: The question is why nobody knows where a bus full of children is for twenty minutes a week.
That lands. She hears him write something down.
On Thursday she parks by the church at 3:30 and waits.
The bus pulls in. The doors open. A boy of about nine gets off, goes into the side entrance, and comes out ninety seconds later with a paper grocery bag held against his chest with both arms.
The driver gets out and takes the bag from him so he can climb the steps, then hands it back.
The doors close. The bus pulls out.
Tamsin sits in her car with her hands on the wheel.
Delphine Karr has driven Route 12 for nine years.
Delphine: You’re Rory’s mum.
Tamsin: I am.
Delphine: You’re going to report me.
Tamsin: I’m going to ask you first.
Delphine leans on the door frame of the bus.
Delphine: Pantry does a family box on Thursdays. Three till four. His mum works till six. If he doesn’t get it Thursday there isn’t one.
Tamsin: And you can’t just tell someone that?
Delphine: I did tell someone. Two years ago. I was told the route can’t deviate.
Tamsin: So instead you’ve deviated for two years.
Delphine: Twenty minutes.
Tamsin: Every week.
Delphine: Every week.
What happened after
Nothing happened to Delphine Karr, in the end, though it was close.
The report Tamsin filed was not about a driver. It was three paragraphs long and it asked one question: whether the district had any mechanism at all for a route to make a scheduled welfare stop, and if not, why not.
It went to the transport committee because Hank Boyle put it there, and he put it there because he’d spent a fortnight looking at four weeks of GPS data and had arrived somewhere uncomfortable.
Route 12 now has a scheduled four-minute stop at the church on Thursdays, on the published timetable, insured and signed off. Two other routes have since asked for the same thing.
Delphine got a written warning for the two years of unlogged deviation, which she says was fair, and a letter of commendation in the same envelope, which she says was strange.
Marcus still gets his box. He gets it now with the bus stopped legally and the hazards on and a driver who doesn’t have to make up twenty minutes on the back half of the route.
Tamsin never told Rory any of it. He thinks his mum complained about the bus being late.
Read the rest of the series in The Mosaic Stories.
More from the series: She Was Laid Off Three Weeks Ago — Her Badge Still Opened The Door · She Never Installed A Smoke Alarm In That Room — So Who Did
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