The Paper Flower He Carried Across the Room
“I’m his real mom,” Brittany said. “She’s not.”
She said it to Mrs. Olson, but she said it at a normal speaking volume, in a kindergarten classroom, in front of twenty-two five-year-olds and about eighteen mothers holding paper cups of fruit punch. Then she turned and looked at me like she had just set something heavy down and was waiting to see if I would pick it up.
I was standing in the doorway of Room 4 at Prairie View Elementary in my blue scrubs, with my name badge still clipped to my pocket. I had run from the dental office on my lunch break that I had saved up all week, and I could still taste the mint from the polishing paste I had been using all morning.
Mrs. Olson had a tray of sugar cookies in her hands. She had been teaching kindergarten for twenty-six years, and for one long second she looked like she had never been handed this particular problem.
And Wyatt, my Wyatt, sat in his little blue plastic chair at the table by the window, with his collared shirt buttoned all the way to the top the way I had buttoned it that morning, and looked at me with his whole face.
I should explain who everybody is, because in that doorway it did not feel like there was time to explain anything.
My name is Kelsey Haugen. I am thirty-three. I clean teeth for a living at a family dental practice on Main Street in a central Minnesota town small enough that I have scraped tartar off the mayor, the Lutheran pastor and both of my old gym teachers.
I married Cody Haugen when Wyatt was three. I met them both when Wyatt was two. Cody is a lineman for the electric co-op, thirty-five, quiet, the kind of man who reads the weather radar the way other men read the sports page.
Wyatt is Cody’s son. Brittany is Wyatt’s mother. She had him when she was twenty-five, and when Wyatt was barely two, she had what everybody in our family has always just called the bad year.
I did not know Brittany during the bad year. I only knew what was left over afterward. A little boy with a car seat that was too small for him, a bag of clothes that did not fit, and a father who had not slept in about a month.
Cody and Brittany worked it out between themselves, with a mediator at the county building, that Wyatt would live with Cody full time and go to Brittany every other weekend. I have never asked Cody for every detail. He told me what he thought I needed to know, and the rest was not mine.
So for three years, Wyatt has lived with us. I know the tags in his shirts have to be cut out or he scratches all day. I know he will eat any vegetable if you call it a dinosaur tree.
I know he is scared of the vacuum and not of thunder, which makes no sense to anybody but him.
I do not call myself his mom out loud. I never have. He calls me Mama Kels, which he made up himself when he was about three, and which I have never once corrected.
The Mother’s Day tea at Prairie View is a tradition older than me. I went to that same school. My own mother, Darlene, sat in one of those same tiny chairs in 1998 and drank the same terrible punch.