It was neither my fault nor my problem. My lesson, it certainly was. Walking our winding driveway that dewy sunrise morning, the kids skittered ahead to wait. Coffee cup in hand, I lagged two school bus lengths behind them. The early autumn air, still heavy with humidity, was cool enough to draw the steam from my cup. I emerged from the tree line that separates our home from the rest of the world to join my sons.

Still young enough to enjoy the daily anticipation of school, they played a game of ‘gotcha,’ earning my often repeated admonition to venture no farther than the ditch, my only means of ensuring one wouldn’t accidentally chase the other into the road.

I love this time of day. The cows provide the backdrop for my mornings, sipping my brew from our front porch, absorbing the newspaper. After, of course, I get the little ones safely on the bus. The joy of my morning is an empty house, awakening birds, still air, a moo, a squawk. This is what I picture as I reached for the Times-Herald inside the delivery box.

The driveway across the street yielded its two participants in our morning ritual. A girl and a boy equal in age to mine, first grade and fifth. A decent separation for the older ones to feel superior, yet close enough to require playmate status of each other. Beyond the little figures, a chocolate cow among the herd monitored their progress.

The two had come a long way, well over a quarter mile from their house to the road, and they’d done it alone. Though not nearly old enough to care for themselves, life’s reality was that their Mom had left for work an hour before, leaving me the nearly reluctant surrogate bus stop Mom. So when they lag in the middle of our curvy, hilly, 70-miles-per-hour country road, I react. Every time. “Come on, get on over here. You can’t stand there in the road. It’s too dangerous.” If they’re going to stand in my driveway to catch the bus, they’ll stand by my rules. Come far enough up into our drive, past the ditch, so that nobody accidentally ends up in the road.

They didn’t exactly join in ‘gotcha’ but played their own version.

My driveway’s not so much a casserole, more like a salad. Tossed together, but distinctly separate.

Snap.

“Oh, Mrs. Amy, my flip flop just broke!” Shantrice cried. “I can’t walk with it now, it keeps falling off.

Flip flops are not appropriate school attire anyway, I thought. No wonder it broke. Surely her mother wouldn’t have let her out of the house dressed this way. Then the question came. “Could you drive me back home to get another pair of shoes?”

I thought about it. I wanted to. But if I had walked all the way back up our driveway, up the stairs, into the house, retrieved the keys, down the stairs into the garage, pulled the car out and back down the drive, across the street the quarter mile to her house, waited for her to find the shoes, and then back to the road, certainly, absolutely, the bus would have come and gone by then. I considered the options. “When you get to school, tell your teacher what happened and see if she can fix it. Surely she has some tape that will work.”

The girl was smart. “Tape can’t fix a flip flop. It will just break again.”

“Well, you might have to call your mother and ask her to bring you another pair.”

I wasn’t going to leave my kids unattended to make the back and forth drive, only to arrive back here and find them gone, hopefully on the bus. Then I’d surely have to drive her to school. But even if I took my kids with me, so they wouldn’t be unattended, I’d still have to drive all of them to school. And there was my coffee, and the paper, and the porch.

The bus would be there any second.

“I’ll do it,” Marcus piped up. “Where are they?” he asked his sister, dropping his backpack on the gravel.

“In my room, the white ones!” she yelled. He was already crossing the street, running as fast as his legs would carry him. I could hear his footsteps in the still morning for a long way, and each one beat into my heart. This little boy, all 10 years of him, had more instinct to care for his little sister than all my mother hen-ing could muster. He wouldn’t let her suffer the humiliation of the teacher, the tape, and certainly couldn’t allow a call to their mother. He was, after all, in charge in the mornings.

I could hear the bus coming. I didn’t hear any return footsteps. Yellow crowded my view across the street. Shantrice yelled “Come on Marcus, hurry up!” I felt small. Very small.

When the brakes finished squealing to a halt, the only thing between me and a sure trip to the school, with the missing boy in tow, was the speed of Marcus’ desire to protect his sister. It was plenty. Heaving and gasping from his unexpected early morning mile run, Marcus arrived, shoes in hand, to save the day.

My kids, their foreheads kissed, had already situated into their seats. Marcus and Shantrice scrambled up the steps and entered the bus that would take them to the safety of school.

I stood at the end of the drive, watching the cow watching me, tears streaming down my face. The newspaper held nothing so important. I pitched the coffee on the ground. The porch, I didn’t deserve. A fifth grade boy, a perfect big brother, had saved his little sister with a burst of protection that I, the adult mother of two, couldn’t bother to find.

I’ll never forget it, though Marcus doesn’t know. He’s in high school now, and that morning’s not likely to clutter his memory. Doing the right thing, instead of the easy; an act a mother considers because she should, but a Hero does, because he must. NCM