The Paper Flower He Carried Across the Room
The flyer came home in Wyatt’s folder two weeks before, on yellow paper, with a clip-art teapot on it. Mrs. Olson had written across the bottom in her neat teacher printing: “Every special grown-up is welcome.”
I put it on the fridge under the magnet shaped like a walleye. I asked my office manager, Kim, for a long lunch on Friday, and she wrote it on the schedule in red pen and drew a heart.
What I did not know was that the flyer had gone to Brittany’s house too. Wyatt had been with her the weekend before, and his folder had gone with him, and she had seen it.
She did not call. She did not text Cody. She just showed up at 1:30, fifteen minutes before me, and sat down in the only chair beside my boy.
There was one tiny chair per child. That is how Mrs. Olson always set it up. Twenty-two children, twenty-two little chairs pulled up beside them, twenty-two paper doilies with a cookie and a cup on each.
Most of the mothers were already sitting when I came in, knees up around their chins in those little chairs, laughing about it. A couple of grandmas had come for kids whose moms were working.
One dad was there, Jeff Lindgren, whose wife was deployed. He was wearing a pink paper corsage the kids had made and not complaining about it at all.
I saw Brittany before she saw me. Bleached hair pinned up fast, a jean jacket, a big purse on her lap. She was sitting very straight, the way you sit in a doctor’s office when you are afraid of what they are going to say.
Then she saw me, and she stood up and walked right past me to Mrs. Olson, and said it.
“I’m his real mom. She’s not.”
I want to tell you I had a speech ready. I did not.
What I had was a room full of kindergartners. They were sitting at those little tables with their hands folded, the way Mrs. Olson had taught them, and every single one of them had turned around to look at the doorway.
Five-year-olds do not understand much about custody. They understand exactly one thing about mothers, which is that you are supposed to have one, and that she is supposed to come.
I thought about little Emma Berg, sitting there with her Grandma Joan because her mom could not get off work. I thought about every child in that room who did not need to hear two grown women argue about who counted.
Mostly I thought about Wyatt.
If I said, “Actually, he lives with us,” Brittany would answer. Then I would answer. And somewhere in between, a little boy in a buttoned-up collar would learn that he was the rope in a tug of war.
So I did not say it.
Mrs. Olson set her tray down on the cubbies. She is a tall, gray-haired Norwegian Lutheran woman who has been at Prairie View long enough to have taught Cody’s younger cousins. She did not try to settle who was who. A kindergarten teacher at a tea is not a judge, and she knew it.
“Every grown-up who came for a child is welcome today,” she said, to both of us at once. Then, quieter, to me: “Let me run across the hall and borrow a chair from Mrs. Peterson’s room.”