The Eleven Widows I Called That Night
I had gone the year before for Henry’s cousin. I remember that child’s hand, hot and a little sticky, pulling me down the hall like I was the best thing she had ever brought to school.
It is a thing to be shown off by a child. If you have had it, you know. If you have not had it in a long while, you know even better.
Dan called at twenty to nine that night from the cab of the tractor.
“Kim sent me a picture of that note,” he said. “You see it?”
“I saw it.”
“He upset?”
“He asked me if he did something wrong.”
“Mom, I’d go in there myself. I can’t get off this thing till it rains.”
“I know you can’t.”
“I could call a board member from here.”
“And say what?”
“Say it’s a dumb thing to do to a bunch of second graders.”
“It is a dumb thing,” I said. “But Danny, if you call the board, what happens? Somebody gets a talking-to. Somebody gets embarrassed. Maybe they put it back on the calendar and maybe they don’t. And either way, that Friday morning, the same children sit there with nobody.”
He was quiet.
“That’s the part that’s wrong,” I said. “It isn’t the canceling. It’s that it’s true. A lot of those children don’t have anybody.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“I don’t know yet. I’m going to go up there in the morning and ask her why.”
He had to go. The combine was calling for him on the radio.
I sat at the table with that yellow paper another hour. I thought about what Walt would have done. Walt would have put on his seed corn cap and driven up there that same afternoon, and he would have been reasonable in a voice you could hear in the parking lot. I loved him forty-eight years. He was a good man and a loud one.
But Walt was not here, and I am not loud.
I folded the note in half and put it in my purse.
Ms. Keller saw me at ten past eight the next morning, after the buses.
I had not made an appointment. I told the secretary at the window who I was and that I would wait as long as it took.
It took six minutes.
She came out herself. Up close she was younger than I expected, forty or so, with a lanyard full of keys and the look of a woman who had already been awake for four hours.
“Mrs. Brandt. Come on back.”
Her office was small, with a child’s drawing of what I think was a horse taped to the filing cabinet. She shut the door and sat down across from me, not behind the desk but in the other visitor’s chair, and I gave her credit for that.
I took the note out of my purse and unfolded it on my knee.
“I’m not here to holler at you,” I said.
“I would understand if you were.”
“I’d just like to know why. My grandson asked me, and I didn’t have anything to tell him.”
She looked at the paper on my knee. Then she looked at the horse on the filing cabinet.
“Can I tell you about last year?” she said.
“I wish you would.”
She told me. She did not use the child’s name, and I did not ask for it.
Last October, in one of the first grade rooms that had been invited along with the second, there had been a little girl whose family had moved here over the summer. Her mother worked two jobs. The grandparents were a long way off. Nobody had sent the form back, and nobody had noticed.