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Cup Sleeves
Episode 2 of 3 of Feet on the White by Calvin Truax · free to read
I shoved the sign up before the gray pickup reached the white line, and the street quit again.
The pickup sat with its front tire on the paint. A ball cap hung in the air above a second grader, lifted clean off his head. Coral was frozen at the curb with one finger touching her tablet.
“Go,” I said. “Everybody across. Dewey, grab the little ones.”
Dewey took two first graders by their backpack straps and towed them like a tugboat. I watched my sweep hand. Twenty-four seconds and they were clear. I was back on the curb at twenty-eight.
At thirty, the pickup went through. Coral’s finger came down on the tablet. The ball cap dropped onto the far curb.
Coral looked at the pole camera, then at me.
“Did he even see the beacon?” she said.
“He saw it. He didn’t care.”
“That’s two.” She typed something. “And my camera skipped again.”
Friday morning I woke up without Thursday.
I told Bonnie all of it at the cart that Friday, standing close so the parents in line wouldn’t hear. She listened while she wiped down the steam wand. She didn’t laugh, which I had been braced for.
“You believe me?” I said.
“I saw that sedan, Lyman. One blink the kids were in the street, and the next they were on the curb. I’ve been chewing on it all week.”
“So you believe me.”
“I believe something’s going on out there.” She folded the rag. “So Thursday’s gone.”
“Clean gone. Like somebody cut it out with a razor.”
“You came by at seven thirty. You asked about my sister’s knee. You said the kids were wound up about the field trip.” She pulled a cardboard sleeve off the stack and wrote on the inside with a marker. “There. Now you have some of it.”
She slid the sleeve over my cup. On the inside, where nobody else would see, it said KNEE. FIELD TRIP. YOU WERE FINE.
“You’d do that every time?” I said.
“Every time you need it. You’ve bought my coffee for four years, Lyman. I can spare a marker.”
I stood there with the cup in both hands. I hadn’t expected to need anybody for this.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Don’t thank me. Just stop losing days on my corner.”
The next week the corner got worse instead of better. Maybe it was the road work two blocks over, pushing traffic our way. Maybe it was just October.
Tuesday morning a delivery van swung the corner without looking, straight at three kids in the crosswalk. I shoved the sign up. The van hung there with its blinker frozen mid-flash. Dewey had the three of them across before I’d even finished checking my watch.
Thursday I woke up blank. Bonnie’s sleeve said NEW SHOES. RAIN. YOU SANG.
“I sang?”
“Badly,” Bonnie said. “Something about a train.”
“I don’t know any songs about trains.”
“You did Wednesday.”
Dewey started meeting me at the curb ten minutes early. He didn’t say why. He just stood next to me and watched the hill.
“You don’t have to do that,” I said.
“I’m not doing anything. I’m standing.”
“Your mother know you’re out here early?”
“She thinks I really like school now.”
Thursday afternoon it was a teenager in his father’s car, going fast enough that I shoved the sign up before I knew I’d done it. It rattled in my hand when the world quit.
Dewey had the first graders across by twenty seconds. He had gotten good at it. I didn’t love that he’d had to.
When the street started again, Coral walked over from her truck with her tablet held out like evidence.
“Four near-misses in nine school days,” she said. “Four camera gaps. Every one exactly thirty seconds. Every one starts with you in the crosswalk and ends with you on the curb.”
“I can’t explain your camera,” I said.
“I think you can. I think you’ve got something in that vest that knocks out my feed.”
“It’s a whistle and a granola bar,” Dewey said. “He gives me half.”
Coral looked at Dewey, then at me. She was tired. I could see it in the way she held the tablet. She had a stack of corners on her list, and mine was the one that didn’t add up.
“I’m not trying to get you fired,” she said. “I’m trying to keep kids from getting hit.”
“So am I.”
“Then we want the same thing.” She tapped the screen. “Four in nine school days is enough for me. I’m sending my recommendation in early. The council votes on a signal in the spring.”
“So I’ve got till spring.”
“The district wants something sooner. They’re renting a temporary signal trailer, and they say a trailer doesn’t need a guard.”
“When?”
“The district says you’re done a week from Friday.”