The Nine Kids on Coon Hollow Road

“Some of them do,” I said.

“Yes. I am beginning to understand that.”

I turned onto the gravel. There was frost on everything, and the road was frozen hard in ruts that grabbed at the wheels. I told him what I knew as we passed it, the way you would show a visitor around a house. The Dennisons’ dogs. The Hobbs place, where the porch light meant their mother had left for the plant. The slab, dry that morning, with a skin of ice at the broken corner.

“That ice is where a child would step,” I said. “It’s the low spot. You wouldn’t see it.”

He looked at it for as long as it stayed in the headlights.

We climbed. He had hold of the handle above the door by then, like most folks the first time up.

At the top, at the wide spot, there was the light.

Jaylen had on a coat a size too big and a stocking cap, and he had Macy wrapped up so that only her eyes showed. He was holding the flashlight down on the frozen ground in front of her boots. When I stopped, he walked her to the door slowly, lighting each step, and he did not let go of her hand until she had hold of mine.

Dr. Whitfield had gotten out. He was standing in the road in his dress shoes.

“Good morning,” he said. “You are Jaylen.”

“Yes, sir.”

“How long have you been waiting out here this morning?”

“Just a couple minutes, sir. Miss Sandy’s always on time. I can see her lights from the trailer when she crosses the creek, and then we come down the lane.”

“And if the van did not come? If you walked to the highway?”

“Forty-one minutes,” Jaylen said. “We practiced. It’d be longer now, though. Macy’s slow in boots.”

“In the dark.”

“I got the flashlight.” He held it up to show him. It was a little plastic thing from the dollar store, the kind that takes two double-A batteries. “Grandma gets me batteries every payday so it won’t go out.”

Dr. Whitfield looked at that flashlight for a long time. Then he looked down the road we had just come up, which was black as the inside of a boot beyond the reach of the headlights.

“Thank you, Jaylen,” he said. His voice was not quite steady. “Go on and get in where it’s warm.”

He did not say another word until the Teagues and the Sutters and the Hobbs kids were all aboard and we were back on the blacktop. The twins were explaining Christmas to him in detail. He nodded at all of it.

At the school he waited until the last child was through the doors.

“I drew that route at my desk,” he said, “with a computer program and a policy manual. I measured one point four miles and I thought, that is under one point five, and I moved on to the next one.” He pressed his gloves flat between his hands. “I have a daughter Macy’s age. I would not let her walk to our mailbox in the dark.”

“No, sir. I don’t expect you would.”

“I still do not have thirty-one thousand dollars, Mrs. Krause. That part has not changed. If I put those spurs back, I have to find it somewhere, and I do not know where.” Then he said the thing I had been waiting five months for somebody to say. “You drove these roads nineteen years. Would you show me?”