The Nine Kids on Coon Hollow Road

A personal day for a new driver is a day with no pay. I knew what he made, to the penny, and I knew what a day of it meant to a house with a baby in it. I told him six ten at the church and to wear a jacket.

By October it is full dark at that hour, and that morning it had rained in the night.

Kyle sat up front beside me and did not say much. When we turned onto the gravel he leaned forward, toward the windshield, the way I had taught him to do when he could not see the edge of a road.

“There’s no shoulder at all,” he said.

“No.”

“What’s that sound?”

“That’s the creek.”

I stopped the van at the slab and put it in park and let him look. The water was running over the concrete maybe three inches deep, brown and quick, sliding off the downstream side into the dark.

“That’s just under the first crack,” I said. “We’re fine in this. It’s nothing to a van.”

“What is it to a kindergartner?”

I did not answer him. He already knew.

Halfway up, headlights came around the bend above us, high and wide, and I pulled as far over as that road lets you, which is not far, with the passenger tires in the weeds. A loaded log truck came down past us with about a foot to spare. The whole van rocked. It was Mr. Hadley’s driver, and he lifted two fingers off the wheel at me, the way he had every morning for years.

Kyle watched the taillights go down the hollow.

“Where would they stand?” he said. “If they were walking. Where would they even get off the road?”

“In the ditch,” I said. “If they heard it in time.”

At the top, the little yellow light was waiting.

Jaylen had Macy by the hand, same as every morning, and he was holding the flashlight on the ground in front of her feet. When he saw two grown-ups in the front seat he stood up a little straighter.

“Morning, Miss Sandy. Morning, Mr. Kyle.”

Kyle got out and opened the side door himself. He stood there holding it while that boy lit his sister’s way up the step, and I watched Kyle’s face in the mirror, and I knew I would never have to say a word to him about any of it.

He rode the whole run. He rode it again that afternoon. When I let him off at the church he stood with his hand on the door a minute.

“I open my doors at that sign every morning,” he said. “I sit there a full minute at an empty stop. I’ve been telling myself it was empty because they were took care of.”

“They are taken care of.”

“By you. For free. In a van the church is buying gas for.” He shook his head. “That ain’t the same as the district doing its job.”

“Kyle. You have a baby.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “I been thinking about her the whole way up that road.”

I did not hear from him about it again for two months, and I did not ask.

On the last morning before Christmas break, the hollow kids were up to something. I could tell by the twins, who could not have kept a secret for cash money. They whispered all the way down to the creek.

When we got to the school, nobody got out.