The Paper Flower He Carried Across the Room
The room had gone quiet. Mothers were still holding their own flowers, but they were looking at us now. Brittany’s hand was still out in the air behind him. She did not seem to know how to put it down.
Wyatt looked back over his shoulder at her. Then he leaned down to my ear, the way he does at bedtime when he has a secret, and cupped one hand around his mouth.
He took a big breath.
“Mama Kels,” he whispered, loud the way five-year-olds whisper, so that every single person in Room 4 could hear it. “This one’s yours because you’re my mom. I made it for you.”
He pushed the pink flower into my hands.
“And I have to go get the other one.”
Before anybody could move, he spun around and ran to the cubbies.
I knew his cubby. It was the third one from the left, with WYATT H. on a strip of masking tape and a sticker of a tractor. He dug down behind his backpack and his spare pants and came out with something crumpled up in his fist.
It was another flower. A yellow one, smaller, with a stem made out of two pipe cleaners twisted together because one had obviously not been long enough. It had no name tag. It looked like it had been made in a hurry, by a boy working alone, out of whatever was left in the scrap box.
He ran back across the room with it, right past me, and stopped in front of Brittany.
“Mrs. Olson said one for your mom,” he told her, very seriously. “But I have two. So I made two.”
He put the yellow flower in her open hand. The one she had not known how to put down.
“I made it at indoor recess,” he added. “Nobody helped.”
I do not know what my face did. I know what Brittany’s did.
It crumpled. Not dramatically. Just slowly, from the chin up, the way a little kid’s face goes when they are trying very hard not to cry in front of people and losing.
She closed her fingers around the yellow flower. She said, “Thank you, buddy,” in a voice that was barely there.
Then she stood up, set her purse on the little chair, and walked out of the classroom into the hallway.
Mrs. Olson, God love her, clapped her hands twice and said, “Who wants more punch?” in the brightest voice I have ever heard a human being use, and twenty-one children shouted “Me!” and the room started moving again.
Wyatt stood beside me holding nothing now, looking at the door Brittany had gone through.
“Did I do it wrong?” he asked me.
I got up off the floor. My right leg had fallen asleep and I had to grab the edge of the table.
I crouched down so my face was level with his.
“You did not do anything wrong,” I told him. “You did one of the kindest things I have ever seen anybody do. You hear me?”
He nodded, but his lip was going.
“Brittany’s not mad at you,” I said. “She’s just got a lot of feelings, like when you see the end of the dinosaur movie. I’m going to go check on her. You stay with Mrs. Olson and eat your cookie for me. Can you do that?”
“Will you come back?”
“I will come right back. I promise.”
He sat down in his little chair. Mrs. Olson came over and stood beside him with one hand on his shoulder and gave me the smallest nod.