The Eleven Widows I Called That Night
I looked at those two boys, and I had to take my glasses off and find the tissue in my sleeve.
Ms. Keller was in the doorway. She had been walking the three second grade rooms the whole hour with that clipboard, back and forth, and I knew what she was doing. She was counting. Fifty-eight children. Fifty-eight chairs with somebody in them. She counted them going down the hall, and then she turned around and counted them coming back, like a woman who does not trust good news.
The cookies came around. Then the bell rang for recess, and the chairs started to scrape, and the grandparents started the long work of standing up.
Leo did not get up.
He was looking at the visitor sticker on my cardigan, with my picture and my name on it.
“Are you Henry’s grandma?” he said.
It was the first thing he had said to me that was not out of a book.
“I am.”
“Then whose are you right now?”
“Right now? Well, I sat down at your desk, didn’t I? I’d say I’m yours and his both.”
He thought about that. He looked at Henry, to see if it was allowed. Henry shrugged, the way a boy does when he has already decided to be generous and does not want it mentioned.
“Are you coming back?”
I thought, Dolores, be careful. This is a child who has had people not come. Do not tell that boy yes and then let the school calendar make a liar of you. There was no next time. I had asked that principal for one morning, and I had no right to promise one minute more of her building.
I looked up at the door, because I did not know what else to do.
Ms. Keller had stopped counting.
She had heard him. She was standing there with the clipboard down at her side, and she was looking at Leo, not at me.
“Mrs. Brandt,” she said, across the room, in front of everybody. “What are you doing the first Friday in November?”
I could not answer her. Vi answered for me, from the floor, where two second graders were trying to pull her up out of the little blue chair.
“She’s free,” Vi said. “We all are. We’re widows. What else have we got?”
The whole room laughed, grown people and children both. And under it I turned to that little boy and said it plain, so he would not have to wonder.
“Yes, Leo. I’m coming back. First Friday of November, nine o’clock. You pick the book.”
He nodded once, like a man closing a deal.
Then he stuck out his hand, and I shook it.
Ms. Keller walked us out herself. All seventeen of us, down that hall, slower than we went in.
At the front doors she asked if I had a minute, and we stood on the sidewalk by the flagpole while the others sorted out who was riding with whom.
“I owe you an apology,” she said.
“You do not.”
“I do, so let me.” She had her arms crossed tight over that clipboard. “I saw one child hurting and I took something good away from every family in the second grade. It never once came to me to ask whether anybody would help. I just assumed it was mine to fix or mine to cancel.” She let out a breath. “I’m sending a letter home Monday. I’m going to say I made the wrong call, and why, and what I saw this morning. I’d rather the parents hear it from me.”