The Paper Flower He Carried Across the Room
I knew how that would go. She would leave the room, twenty-two five-year-olds would be alone with this, and she would come back carrying a big grown-up chair that would sit two feet higher than all the little ones, with me perched on top of it like a lifeguard.
“Thank you,” I said. “Really. I’m fine right here.”
And I walked over to Wyatt’s table and sat down on the floor.
I sat cross-legged on the tile right beside his little chair, in my scrubs, with my badge swinging. The floor was cold through the fabric and gritty with a little bit of sand that had come in on somebody’s shoes from the playground.
My knees were higher than the table. My head was about level with Wyatt’s shoulder.
Brittany had gone back to the chair. She sat down slowly, holding her purse with both hands. She did not look at me. I did not look at her. We were about three feet apart, and between us was a five-year-old with a sugar cookie in front of him that he was not eating.
Wyatt reached down without looking and took a fistful of my sleeve.
He did not say anything. He just held on.
I want to tell you where Cody was, because people always ask, and they are right to.
On Thursday night, a line of storms had come through out of South Dakota. It snapped poles from our county clear over to the next one, and by the time I woke up Friday morning, the co-op had every crew they had out on the roads.
Cody left the house at 4:10 a.m. I heard his truck start. When I texted him at noon, he wrote back a picture of a pole lying across a gravel road with the wires tangled in a fence line, and the words: “Forty miles out. Maybe home by dark. Tell Wy I’m sorry.”
Cody would have known what to do in that doorway. He talks to Brittany in the same low, steady voice he uses on scared dogs and frozen trucks.
But he was up in a bucket near the county line, putting the lights back on for about six hundred farms, and I would not have called him down for anything.
So it was just me, on the floor.
Mrs. Olson clapped her hands twice, the way she does, and the room came back to itself.
“Okay, friends. Let’s show our special grown-ups what we’ve been practicing.”
The children got up and shuffled to the front of the room and stood in a crooked line in front of the whiteboard. Somebody’s shoe was untied. Somebody’s sister in the back started to cry and had to be bounced.
Wyatt let go of my sleeve last. He was the second to last kid in line.
They sang “You Are My Sunshine.”
Kindergartners sing that song like they are mad at it. Loud and flat and very fast, with all their teeth showing. Usually it makes every mother in the room laugh and cry at the same time.
Wyatt sang the first line looking at me on the floor.
Then he looked at Brittany in the chair and sang one line to her.
Then back to me. Then back to her. Back and forth, the whole song, like a little boy trying to hand out the same cookie to two people without breaking it.
I felt my throat close up. Not because he looked at her. Because he felt like he had to. No five-year-old should have to split a song in half.
After the song they recited a poem about mothers’ hands. Then each child stood up one at a time and said one thing they loved about their special grown-up.