The Eleven Widows I Called That Night

We lined up at the office window with our driver’s licenses out, like people boarding an airplane.

The secretary ran each one through the little machine. Then it printed a sticker with our picture and our name and the date, and we stuck it on.

It took twenty minutes. Not one of us minded. That is how it ought to be. Those are somebody’s babies in there.

Ms. Keller came out of her office with a clipboard.

She had every slip back. She told me so first thing, quietly, at my elbow. Not one family had said no. The last four she had telephoned herself, and one of those mothers she had caught between shifts at seven the night before.

“She said yes?”

“She said nobody ever asked her boy to anything before.” Ms. Keller looked down at her clipboard. “That was Leo’s mother.”

Then she walked us down the hall.

The real grandparents were already coming in behind us, the ones who had a child of their own in those rooms, and by the time we reached the second grade wing they were holding the doors for us.

Mr. Sims was at his classroom door. He is a young man in his second year of teaching, and he shook every hand that came through his door.

“I didn’t want it canceled,” he said to me, low. “I should have said so louder than I did.”

“You’re saying it now,” I told him. “Where do you want us?”

He had set it up himself, before school. Every desk had a second chair pulled up beside it. Every one. He had borrowed extras from the kindergarten room and carried them up the hall two at a time. You could not have told, looking at that room, which children were the twenty-three.

That is what I had been trying to say to Ms. Keller that Tuesday. That young man said it with furniture.

Everybody looked at those little blue chairs and looked at each other.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Vi said, and sat down in one.

Her knee cracked like a stick of kindling. A little boy at the next desk laughed out loud, clapped his hand over his mouth, and looked scared to death.

“That’s the new one,” Vi told him. “You ought to hear the old one.”

Mr. Sims did the matching himself, right there at the door, the way the other two teachers were doing it down the hall. He had a sheet of paper folded in his shirt pocket, and he never once took it out where a child could see it. He just walked each of us to a desk, like an usher.

“Vi, this is Caleb. And this young lady on your other side is Josie. They’ve both been wondering who they’d get.”

“Well, Caleb and Josie,” Vi said. “I hope you like a talker. What have you got in those folders?”

“Marge, I’d like you to meet Macy.”

“Harold, this is Tyler. Tyler knows more about tractors than I do.”

Not one word about who had a grandparent and who did not. He introduced us like company.

You should have seen those children’s faces. That is the thing I cannot get down right. A grown person had put on her good cardigan and stood in a line and come down that hall for no other reason than to sit by them.

Harold folded himself down next to a boy in a John Deere sweatshirt and opened that book about harvest machinery, and the two of them did not look up for forty minutes. I heard Harold say, “Now that there is the auger,” in the same voice he uses to read Scripture.