The Mittens Under the Bazaar Table

I did not want to step on any toes, and I did not want anybody to think a strange woman was handing things out to children at a bus stop.

She knew me, of course. Everybody in that building knew me.

“Sandra Holm,” she said, “if you are standing out there at six above with a basket of mittens, I am not about to tell you no. Do you need anything from us?”

“Just the sizes for the kids in the second and third stops,” I said. “I’ll guess on the rest.”

She gave them to me off the top of her head. A good principal knows things like that.

At seven o’clock Dave had the truck warmed up and idling in the yard with the defrost on high. He did not ask where we were going. He had heard both phone calls from the bathroom, shaving.

He carried the bins out, and I sorted mittens into my big wicker basket on the seat between us, smallest on top, as we drove. My fingers knew the sizes without looking.

The elevator stop is a wide gravel spot on the shoulder of the county road, right where the trailer court lets out and the township road comes in from the east.

Eleven kids get on there. It was the biggest stop on my route for thirty-one years, and the coldest, because the wind comes straight across the open field from the north with nothing to stop it.

Four of them were there when we pulled up, standing in a loose clump with their backs to the wind, and the rest were still coming down the lane. Backpacks, stocking caps, breath going up like smoke from a chimney.

A couple of moms sat in running cars on the shoulder, the way moms do when it is this cold.

I got out with the basket on my hip. The cold went right through my coat, the kind of cold that makes your nose hairs stick together on the first breath.

I looked at hands. I could not help it. Thirty-one years.

Two of them had bare hands, jammed up inside their coat sleeves. One girl had on a pair of thin knit gloves with two fingertips worn through.

And one little boy, maybe eight, had a pair of white tube socks pulled up over his hands like puppets, with the heels sticking out at the wrists.

I knew him. Wes. He had been my rider in kindergarten, the year before I retired, a little guy with big ears who sat in the front seat behind me every day and told me about his dog.

He squinted up at me in the gray light. “Miss Sandra?” he said. “You don’t drive anymore.”

“No, honey, I sure don’t.” I shifted the basket onto my other arm. “Take those socks off and hold out your hands.”

He looked at the basket. He looked at me. Then he pulled the socks off with his teeth, one and then the other, and held out two little red hands, the knuckles chapped and raw.

I picked out a red pair, size eight, and bent down over him in the gravel. The cold came right up through the legs of my slacks.

I worked the first mitten over his fingers and fit his thumb into the gusset, and I folded the cuff down over his coat sleeve, snug.

“There,” I said. “That one’s yours. Now the other one.”

The other kids had crowded around by then. A girl in a pink coat asked, “Are those for anybody?” and I said, “They’re for anybody whose hands are cold,” and three more hands came out.