The Mittens Under the Bazaar Table

Dave drove a while. He is not a talker. Forty years married, and I have learned that when he goes quiet like that he is turning something over the way he turns over an engine that will not start, looking for the part that is loose.

“Didn’t look nice from where I was standing,” he said finally.

Then he put his big hand on my knee, the way he used to when we were dating and drove the back roads home from the dance hall in Blackduck, and he left it there until we turned into our yard.

The bins sat in our back hall for two weeks, right next to the chest freezer and the boot tray. Every time I went out to the garage I walked past them.

I did not know what I was going to do with them. That is the truth.

I had bought them back because I could not stand to leave them under that tablecloth, but I had not thought one inch past that.

Some nights I lifted a lid and looked at them.

Red and blue and green, a few in the gray heather color that does not show the dirt, a handful in bright yellow because little girls like yellow. Sizes from preschool up to sixth grade.

I thought about selling them myself at the craft fair in Bemidji in December. They would have brought twenty dollars a pair there, easy. I thought about giving them to the food shelf.

But neither of those felt right. Something in me wanted them on the hands they were made for.

Then on the first Tuesday in November, the cold came.

It always comes all at once up here. One day it is forty degrees and raining, and the next morning you wake up and the windows are white at the corners and the bank sign on Main Street says six above zero.

I was up at 5:30, like always, because thirty-one years of driving bus does not let go of your body just because you stopped.

I stood at the kitchen window with my coffee and watched the frost on the yard light, and I thought about Route 4.

Somewhere out there, eleven kids were going to be standing at the stop by the grain elevator in about ninety minutes. I knew those kids. Some of them I had driven to kindergarten.

And I knew, the way you know where the potholes are, that some of them would not have mittens on this first cold morning, because nobody had dug out the winter box yet, or because there was no winter box.

I set down my coffee, went to the back hall, and looked at the bins.

Then I went to the phone and called Gordy.

Gordy is fifty-eight and has four grandkids and drives Route 4 now like he was born to it. He answered on the second ring, already in his bus barn, I could hear the diesel idling.

“Sandra? Is something wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong. Are you running the elevator stop at ten after seven?”

“Same as always. Why?”

I told her. It took about two sentences. She was quiet for a second, and then he laughed, the big laugh he has, and said, “I’ll hold the door as long as you need. Just don’t make me late for the Peterson lane, their mom will call the school.”

Then I called Mrs. Fischer, the principal at the elementary.