“My daughter is eight and you called it a GAME,” I said, with SEVENTEEN motorcycles idling at the curb behind me.
The principal’s face lost every drop of its color.
Josie had been coming home for five weeks with her sleeves pulled down over her hands, even on the hot days.
A month before that afternoon, I’d have sworn she was just cold-natured.
I clean rooms at a motel off 250, doubles most weeks, and I usually walk in after she’s asleep.
Her dad left when she was three. That leaves her and me and my father, who still rides with his old club out of Paden City and sleeps on my couch when he’s off the road.
Pop caught it first. He reached for her book bag at the door one evening and she ducked like he’d swung at her.
Once he said it out loud, I couldn’t stop seeing it.
She quit wanting to go, and her stomach started hurting at ten till seven every morning, right on schedule.
“Recess gets rough, hon,” the office lady said when I called the school. “Try not to worry.”
Then at bath time I saw the marks, the same four on each arm, up high where a sleeve hides them.
I asked her who. She wouldn’t give me a name.
She lined her shampoo bottles up along the tub and said, “The playground lady says it’s just the fence game.”
I called again, and they said somebody would “follow up.”
The phone never rang.
My father set his coffee down and said he was riding to pickup with me the next day, and bringing some of the men. I told him I didn’t want a scene.
“I’m not bringing one,” he said. “I’m bringing the end of one.”
The next afternoon at 3:02, three boys had Josie against the chain-link out by the ball field, and the aide stood thirty feet off, thumbing a phone in a sunflower case.
Pop didn’t even look at the boys. He walked right by them, up to her, and wanted her name.
“I don’t have to tell you that,” she said, and kept scrolling.
Then the principal came out the side doors at a half-jog, saw SEVENTEEN MOTORCYCLES parked nose-out along the curb, and said, “Can somebody tell me what is going on out here?”
I stepped in front of my father before he could answer.
“MY DAUGHTER IS EIGHT AND YOU CALLED IT A GAME,” I said, and heads turned in every car in the pickup line. “She told all of you for five weeks.”
The principal started in on liability, and the district, and how she’d “get somebody to pull the footage.”
Pop folded his arms. “A camera saw all this?”
She stopped talking.
Her eyes went to the boys, then to the aide, then back to us.
“That camera,” she said, “hasn’t worked since the first week of school.”
The Camera Over the Ball Field
So there was no tape. There was nothing of the fence, or of the thirty feet between my girl and that phone, from any afternoon of those five weeks.
Vicki Hoke said it, and then she stood there on the sidewalk like she wanted it back.
The boys were already moving. They went toward the car line fast without running, the way kids walk when they know running looks worse.
Josie hadn’t come off the fence. She had her fingers hooked through the chain-link and her hood up, and the bank sign on 250 had said eighty-nine when I drove past it.
I went and got her. She let go of the fence one finger at a time.
“Hey, bug,” I said. “We’re going home.”
She looked past me at the curb, at her Pop’s friends and their motorcycles.
“Are they here for me?”
“They’re here with me,” I said.
She thought about that. Then she put her hand in mine, sleeve and all.
Behind us the principal had found her voice. She said the district had a policy on gatherings. She said the bus lane had to be clear by 3:15. She said all of it to my father, because he was the tallest thing on that sidewalk.
He let her finish. Then he turned around and lifted two fingers at Lew.
Lew is somewhere past sixty and wears his reading glasses on a cord over his vest. He said, “Sure thing,” to nobody in particular, and every man on that curb went to his bike.
Nobody revved anything. They walked the motorcycles off the curb by the handlebars and rolled them across the road to the gravel in front of the feed store. They parked them in a row, nose-out, facing the school, and then they stood beside them with their arms folded and waited.
The aide slid her phone into her back pocket. It was the first time all afternoon I’d seen her hands empty.
“I hear that you’re upset,” Vicki Hoke said to me. “But I need it in writing. Whatever you have. Dates, names.”
“I called here. Twice.”
“Then there’ll be a record,” she said.
I got Josie buckled into the back seat and sat behind the wheel with the engine off, trying to think of anything I had written down anywhere.
A flinch and a hoodie in the heat.
What do you hand a principal when the only camera on the place has been dead since the first week of school?
The Sheets at the Starlite
The Starlite Motel sits on 250 between a tire place and a church that used to be a bank. I’ve cleaned rooms there for six years.
Marla Tipton runs housekeeping. She’s run it since before the owners’ son could drive, and she has one rule she says every week like it’s scripture.
“If it’s not on the sheet, you didn’t clean it.”
Every room gets a line on a clipboard sheet. Room number, time in, time out, your initials. Towels are counted and coffee pods are counted. If a guest says you took his phone charger, Marla gets the sheet out and puts her finger on your line, and the line either saves you or it doesn’t.
My first year I thought she was a crank about it. Then a man in 22 swore somebody had been through his bag. My line said I’d been in 22 for eleven minutes at 9:40 in the morning, and he hadn’t checked in till 2:15. Marla walked that sheet out to the front desk herself, and that was the end of it.
After that I wrote everything on those sheets. Grocery lists went on the back, and so did the number for the man who fixes my brakes.
They’re the only paper I ever have on me. They live folded in quarters in my apron pocket all week, and on the weekend they go in the door pocket of my car, because I never once remember to throw them out.
Josie keeps her own kind of sheet.
When she started kindergarten she wanted to know how many days were left till the weekend. I bought a grocery-store calendar with a covered bridge on it and taped it to the fridge, and she drew something in every school day’s square. A sun when it was sunny, a slice of pizza on pizza day.
She’s kept it up every year since. She’s eight now, and she still does it with the same purple marker, standing on the step stool before bed.
I never looked at it much. It was hers.
She counts things, too. The steps up to the porch. The cars ahead of us at the drive-through. Pop says she’ll grow up to be an accountant or a bank robber, and she likes both of those fine.
That night after the curb, she climbed up on her stool and drew in that day’s square, same as always. Then she got down and put the marker back in the cup.
I was at the sink with my back to her.
I didn’t turn around to see what she drew.
I’ve thought about that more than anything the principal ever said to me.
Gaynell at the Front Desk
I took the next morning off to go in. That was a shift, and Marla covered it without a word, which is how I knew she’d already heard about the curb.
The front office at Poplar Run smells like laminating plastic and burnt coffee, same as when I went there myself. Gaynell was at the desk. She’s been at that desk since I was in second grade, and she calls every grown woman hon.
“I called here twice,” I said. “Once on the eighth and once on the fifteenth. I talked to you both times.”
“Oh, hon, I talk to a hundred parents a week.”
“You said recess gets rough.”
“Well,” Gaynell said, “it does.”
Vicki Hoke came out and walked me back to her office herself. There was a folder on her desk with Josie’s name on the tab, and it was thin.
She was nicer than she’d been on the sidewalk. She said she understood this was upsetting. She said she’d looked into it personally.
“We don’t have a note of any call from you,” she said. “I checked the log. I’m not saying you didn’t call. I’m saying if it isn’t logged, it never reached me.”
“Gaynell answered.”
“Gaynell doesn’t handle recess.”
Then she explained the fence game to me.
It was tag, she said, and the fourth graders made it up. The fence was base. If you were touching the fence you were safe.
The younger kids liked playing with the big ones, and sometimes it got rowdy. Deb Pardue had been on that playground for eleven years without one incident report.
“Josie’s teacher describes her as sensitive,” she said. “Very bright. A little anxious. We have a counselor two days a week who’s wonderful with peer conflict.”
Peer conflict.
“She’s been wearing a hoodie,” I said. “It was eighty-nine degrees yesterday.”
“Kids have their comfort items.”
She slid a form across the desk for the counselor, with a line at the bottom for my signature.
“And I’d ask,” she said, “that your father’s group not come onto school property again. I’m sure they’re very nice men. But you can see how it looked to the other families.”
I didn’t sign it. I folded it in quarters and put it in my pocket, out of habit.
Out in the hall I passed the big window that looks over the ball field. There was the camera, up on the light pole above the fence, aimed right at the corner where they’d had her.
It had a little red light on the front. The light wasn’t blinking.
It wasn’t on at all.
The Magnet on the Silver Tahoe
Pop wanted to ride over again that afternoon. I told him not to.
“She said school property,” he said. “The road isn’t school property.”
“Pop. Please.”
He sat back down. He’s sixty-three, and in my whole life he has never done what I told him the first time, but he did then.
I did pickup alone. I parked where I could see the fence and didn’t get out.
The aide was at the corner again with the sunflower phone in her hand. Josie was on the swings where I’d told her to stay, and nobody was near her.
The bell rang and the car line started crawling. A silver Tahoe with a PARDUE PLUMBING & HEATING magnet on the driver’s door pulled up at the cone.
One of the three boys got in the back.
He was the biggest one, in a red shirt, the one who’d been closest to her at the fence the day before. He threw his book bag in ahead of him and climbed in after it.
The aide walked over from the corner, leaned in the passenger window and said something to the woman driving, and they both laughed. Then she reached into the back seat and rubbed the top of his head.
I sat there with both hands on the wheel.
Josie climbed in behind me and did her own seat belt.
“Who’s the boy in the red shirt?” I said.
“Brayden.”
“How old is Brayden?”
“Ten. He’s in fourth. He got held back once.”
“Is he the playground lady’s boy?”
She was already looking out her window.
“That’s his mom,” she said. “She says he’s just playing.”
Two days later a letter came home in her take-home folder, on district paper, with Vicki Hoke’s signature at the bottom.
It said an individual associated with our household had engaged in conduct that several families found intimidating. It said Rodney Coldiron was not to be present on school grounds, including the pickup area, for the rest of the year. It said the school had offered my daughter counseling support and the offer had not been accepted.
It didn’t say a thing about a fence.
Pop read it standing at the counter with his glasses pushed up on his forehead. Then he laid it face down.
“She spelled my whole name right,” he said. “I’ll give her that much.”
He went out to the garage. I heard him out there a long time, not fixing anything, just moving things from one shelf to another.
I stuck the letter on the fridge with a magnet, right over the covered bridge.
It was the only paper that school had handed me in five weeks, and it was about my father.
Nineteen Squares of Purple Marker
The school board was meeting on the twenty-ninth in the high school gym. It was in the paper.
I got up after midnight to write it on the calendar, because I couldn’t sleep and it was something to do.
I took the letter down to get at the square.
And there were her drawings, every school day since the middle of August, in purple marker. I’d walked past them fifty times a day.
Suns and clouds. Pizza. A little yellow bus the day the bus broke down and they all walked.
On some of the days, down in the corner of the square, there was a small grid. Crisscross lines, like a waffle, like a tic-tac-toe board that kept going past where you’d stop.
I stood there in my sock feet with the fridge door open for the light.
It was a fence.
The first one was in the second week of school. There were two more that same week. After that it was nearly every day.
I counted them twice. Nineteen.
There was a fence on the eighth, the day I made the first call, and another the day after. There was one on the fifteenth, with a small sun next to it, because it had been sunny.
I heard her on the stairs. She’d come down for water.
“What are these ones, bug?” I said, and I kept my voice as flat as I could make it.
She looked at where my finger was.
“Those are the fence days,” she said, and got her water, and went back up.
I went out to my car barefoot and took every folded sheet out of the driver’s door pocket. There were eleven weeks of them. I spread them on the kitchen table and opened them one at a time.
The brake man. Milk, eggs, dryer sheets.
On the back of the sheet for September 8, rooms 14 through 19, there was my own handwriting, crooked because I’d had the phone on my shoulder: called school 11:52, front desk, Gaynell, recess gets rough.
On the back of September 15: called again 12:10, Gaynell, somebody will follow up.
Room numbers on the front of the sheet. My daughter on the back.
Every line had my initials and the times, and Marla’s initials sat at the bottom of each sheet where she checks them. Anybody could see which rooms I’d done that day, and that I’d been on the phone between 14 and 15 at 11:52.
I laid the calendar next to them on the table, the fence days beside the call days.
In the morning I took all of it to the Starlite and ran three sets through the copier in Marla’s office. She wanted to know what it was, and I told her.
She read the sheets herself. She put her finger on my line for the eighth, the way she does.
“That’s you,” she said. “That’s your writing, and that’s my mark.”
She initialed every copy next to her initials on the originals.
“If they want to argue with a sheet,” she said, “they can argue with me.”
Vicki Hoke’s Desk
I didn’t make an appointment. I went in at 7:45, before the buses, with Josie in the back seat and Pop in the passenger seat. The letter said grounds, so he stayed in the car on the street with the window down.
“Hon, she’s got a full morning,” Gaynell said.
I said I’d wait. I sat in the plastic chair by the nurse’s door with the folder on my knees, and after ten minutes Vicki Hoke came out and took me back.
I laid the copies on her desk: one page of the calendar and two sheets from the Starlite.
I didn’t say anything.
She looked at them a long time. Then she talked.
“I can see you’ve put a lot of thought into this,” she said. “And I want you to know I take it seriously. I do. But you understand that a child’s drawings on a calendar are a child’s drawings. I can’t carry a page of crosshatching to the district. They’d laugh me out of the building.”
She moved the calendar page an inch to the left, away from the sheets.
“And these are your work papers? With all respect, anybody can write anything on the back of anything.”
“Marla signed them,” I said.
“Who’s Marla?”
“The woman I work for.”
She let that go by.
“Look,” she said. “Deb has had a very hard year. I won’t get into it. Her husband’s business, her mother’s health. She’s a good aide. She has been a good aide for eleven years. And Brayden is a boy who has struggled, and the last thing he needs is a label over a game of tag because some kids are more tender than others.”
She stopped and started over.
“What I can do is move Josie’s recess. She can go out with the second graders on the other side of the building. She’d never even see that fence. I can have it done by lunch.”
“And the other little ones who play base?”
“I don’t have any other complaints.”
I didn’t answer that.
She picked up the sheet for the eighth, looked at it, and set it down again.
“You have to understand what it looked like out there,” she said. “Seventeen motorcycles in my car line. Parents called me at home that night. Parents called the district. One mother told me she thought it was a gang. That’s the complaint I have in writing. That’s the one with a record. So when you come in here wanting to know what I did for five weeks, I’d like to know what your family did in five minutes.”
She said a good deal more. She said liability three more times. She said the board had a process, the process took time, and a calendar didn’t start a process. She said she’d hate to see any of this end up in the paper, for Josie’s sake.
When she was done, I picked the calendar page up off her desk and left her the copies of the sheets.
“Those are yours,” I said. “Another set’s going in the board office mail slot this morning. I’m reading the dates out at the meeting on the twenty-ninth.”
She opened her mouth.
“And I’m taking her out of here,” I said.
“You don’t have to do that. Where would she even go, Clay Hill? You’d be driving twenty-six minutes each way.”
“I know.”
She said something else as I got up, something about withdrawal paperwork. I was already in the hall.
Gaynell didn’t look up when I passed.
Through the big window, the little light on the camera over the fence was still off.
Clay Hill, the First Warm Morning
Clay Hill Elementary is in Sistersville, twenty-six minutes up the river road if nobody’s stuck behind a coal truck.
To get her there and still clock in, I had to give up the evening double at the Starlite. Marla moved me to straight mornings. That’s fourteen rooms a day instead of twenty-two, and it comes to a hundred and ten dollars a week less than I’d been bringing home.
I did the math on the back of a sheet. Then I folded it in quarters and put it in my apron with the others.
On the twenty-ninth I read the dates into the microphone in the high school gym, the eighth and the fifteenth and the nineteen fence days. I had three minutes and used about two of them.
I don’t know what anybody did with it after. I didn’t stay to hear, because Josie had school in the morning.
Pop rode behind my car her first day, and Lew rode behind him. They didn’t come onto the lot. They pulled off on the shoulder across the road from the drop-off, nose-out, and sat on their bikes while I walked her up.
It was warm already, seventy-some at 7:40, and it was going to be hot again by noon.
At the door she stopped and looked down at her hands inside her sleeves.
Then she pushed them up, both of them, to the elbow, and held the door for the kid behind her.
I stood there till it swung shut.
Across the road Pop lifted two fingers off his handlebar. I lifted two back, walked to the car, and went to work.
If this one got to you, send it to somebody who’s still waiting on a school office to call them back.
For more stories about this family, check out “His Lawyer Wanted the Supervised Visits Ended by Noon”, “Her Father Was Waiting on the Steps Forty Minutes Early”, and “My Daughter Unpacked Her Weekend Bag Twice the Night Shane Was Due”.
