The Nine Kids on Coon Hollow Road

I got them to the elementary doors at seven ten, when breakfast opens. I had taken nine permission forms to Kim in the office the Friday before, the same form a grandmother or an aunt fills out to be on a child’s pickup list. She had stamped every one without a word and then come around the counter and hugged my neck.

So that was how it went. Six ten in the morning, three fifteen in the afternoon, and the feed store in between.

Dr. Whitfield knew by the second day. He could not have missed it; a church van with Pleasant Grove Baptist painted down the side sat in his own car rider line twice a day. He never said a word against it. There was nothing for him to say. I was a woman on nine pickup lists giving nine children a ride.

Once, in September, he was standing duty at the curb when I pulled up. He opened the van door himself and helped Macy down.

“Good morning, Mrs. Krause,” he said.

“Good morning, Dr. Whitfield.”

That was all. He looked like a man who had a pebble in his shoe and no polite place to sit down and take it out.

People wanted me to make more of it. I want to be honest about that, because I was tempted.

The woman who writes for the county paper came by the feed store and said she had heard something and would I like to talk. Two of the school board members go to my church, and one of them stopped me in the parking lot and said, “Sandy, say the word and I’ll put it on the agenda.” I told every one of them no, thank you.

I was not being a saint about it. I just could not see the next step. If I shamed that man in the paper, he would dig in, the way anybody does, and the board would have to back him, and the hollow would turn into a thing people took sides on at ball games. The kids were getting to school. I could keep that up for as long as it took for somebody to look at that road with his own eyes.

I will admit I did not expect the eyes to be Kyle’s.

Kyle Bender had come to my house the week I turned in my keys. He stood on my porch with his cap in his hands like a boy who had put a baseball through my window.

“I didn’t ask for your route, Sandy,” he said. “I swear I didn’t. He called me in and it was done. I’ll give it back. I’ll tell him I won’t take it.”

“You’ll do no such thing,” I said. “You’ve got a wife and a baby. How old is she now?”

“Five months.”

“Then you drive that bus, and you drive it right. You check your mirrors and you count heads, and you do not let the Miller boy sit in the back seat no matter what he promises you.”

He laughed a little, and then he did not. “It ain’t right, though.”

“No,” I said. “But it isn’t yours to carry. Go on home.”

I thought that was the end of it between us. Then, one Monday in October, he called me at the feed store.

“I took tomorrow off,” he said. “Personal day. They’ve got a sub on 7. Can I ride with you in the morning?”

“What for?”

“I want to see what I’m driving past.”