The Nine Kids on Coon Hollow Road

The first day of school I turned the key in that van at six ten in the morning, in the church lot, with the sweetgum dripping on the windshield.

It is nine miles from Pleasant Grove to the mouth of the hollow. I had the windows down. It was already warm, and there was fog lying in every low place the way it does in August, thick as quilt batting.

I turned off Route K onto the gravel and it was like putting on an old coat.

I know that road better than I know my own hallway. I know the Dennisons’ two heelers will run the fence but will not come through it. I know which porch lights are on timers and which mean somebody is up. I know the slab at Coon Creek has a broken corner on the upstream side, and that if the water is over the second crack you do not cross it, you back up to the Hobbs drive and you wait.

The water was down. I crossed and climbed.

At the top, where the road widens out by the Pruitt mailbox, there was a light.

It was a little yellow flashlight, pointed at the ground. Behind it stood Jaylen Pruitt, fourth grade, in a clean shirt with the store creases still in it. He was holding the flashlight in one hand and his sister’s hand in the other. Macy was five, starting kindergarten that morning, and her backpack was nearly as big as she was.

I pulled up and got out and slid the side door open.

“Morning, Miss Sandy,” Jaylen said, as if I had only been gone for the summer.

“Morning, Jaylen. Morning, Miss Macy. You ready for kindergarten?”

Macy looked at the van, and then at her brother. “It’s not yellow,” she said.

“No, ma’am. It’s the same driver, though.”

She thought that over and decided it would do. I lifted her backpack and gave her my hand up the step, and Jaylen held the flashlight on her feet until she was all the way in, the way you would for a lady getting out of a car at night. Then he clicked it off and put it in his pocket.

I buckled Macy into the booster. Jaylen sat beside her.

“Grandma made us practice,” he said, while I was turning around. “In July, when the letter came. We walked it to the highway three times, on her day off.”

“Did you.”

“I timed it on her phone. It’s forty-one minutes with Macy. She’s got short legs.” He said it plainly, not complaining, a boy reporting a number. “It’s twenty-six if it’s just me. But it’s not ever going to be just me.”

I had to look out the side window for a second.

“Well,” I said. “It’s about four minutes in a van.”

We picked up Hannah and Ben Teague at their gate, and Emma and Luke Sutter, and at the bottom, just above the creek, the three Hobbs kids: Travis, who was in seventh grade and too cool to speak, and the twins, Cody and Carly, who were in second grade and spoke enough for everybody.

Nine. I counted them in the mirror the way I always had.

When we came out of the hollow onto Route K, there was nobody standing at the new stop. It was just a green sign on a post in the fog. Every morning that fall, Kyle pulled Bus 7 up to it, opened the doors on an empty roadside, waited the required minute, and drove on.