The Nine Kids on Coon Hollow Road

“It is within policy. District policy allows a walk of up to a mile and a half to a designated stop. I measured it. The farthest residence is one point four.” He said it gently, like a man reading a thermometer. “That spur costs me close to three miles a day and fourteen minutes, and I have six more like it across the district. I cut all seven.”

“Have you been up it?”

“I have driven the highway.”

“It’s gravel. There’s no shoulder. There’s a low-water slab over Coon Creek that runs wet after any kind of rain.” I could hear my own voice and it was still quiet, which surprised me. “The stop time on this sheet says six forty. To make six forty, the little ones at the top leave their porch before six. By October that is pitch dark. The log trucks from Hadley’s mill come down that road at a quarter till.”

“Parents are welcome to drive their children to the stop.”

“Half those parents are on first shift at the chicken plant in Cassville. They’re gone by five.”

He did not have an answer for that, and he did not pretend to. He just looked at the paper between us.

“I need to know by Friday about the aide position,” he said. “I do hope you will take it. I mean that.”

I thought he probably did mean it. That was the part that stung. He thought he was doing me a kindness, and he had no idea what he had drawn on that map.

I took the bus keys out of my purse. They were on a brass ring with a little leather tag my husband had stamped with a 7 the first year I drove. I worked the two district keys off the ring and laid them on the aide paper.

“Thank you for the offer, Dr. Whitfield,” I said. “I’ll pass. Kyle will need these.”

“Mrs. Krause. You do not have to decide today.”

“I know it.”

I shook his hand, because I was raised to, and I walked out past Kim at the front desk, who had clearly heard every word through the door and could not look at me.

I sat in my truck in the school lot for a while with the empty ring in my hand. I did not cry. I counted mailboxes instead. Pruitt, Teague, Sutter, Hobbs. Four mailboxes, nine children.

My husband, Dale, drives a propane truck for the co-op, and he was home by five that day. I told him at the kitchen table, all of it, the twelve dollars and the map.

Dale is not a loud man. He got up, got the atlas out of the hall closet, and opened it to our county like he needed to see it for himself.

“A mile and four tenths,” he said. “At six in the morning.”

“In the dark by fall.”

“I’ll go to the board meeting,” he said. “I’ll stand up and say it. I’ll take off work.”

“The board meets the third Thursday. School starts the twentieth.” I had already been around this block in the truck. “And that board hired him to do exactly this, Dale. They told him to find money and he found it. If I go in there hollering, it’s a fight till Christmas, and I’m the bitter old driver who lost her route. Meanwhile those kids walk every morning while the grown-ups argue.”

“So call the paper.”

“Then it’s a fight with a photograph.”

He closed the atlas. “What do you want to do, then?”

“I want them to get to school Wednesday week,” I said. “That’s all. The rest can wait.”

He looked at me a long minute.

“What have we got that seats nine?” he said.