The Paper Flower He Carried Across the Room
I put the pink flower in my scrub pocket, very carefully, and went out into the hall.
The hallway at Prairie View smells exactly the way it did when I was a kid there. Floor wax and crayons and the hot-dish smell coming up from the cafeteria. The walls were covered with construction-paper butterflies.
Brittany was standing at the drinking fountain by the gym doors with her back to me. She had both hands on the edge of the fountain like she was holding herself up. The yellow flower was lying in the basin.
I stopped about six feet from her. I did not know what I was going to say. I had been angry for about fifteen minutes straight, and now that I was out of that room, I could feel how tired the anger was.
“He’s okay,” I said. “He thinks he did something wrong. I told him he didn’t.”
She laughed, one short ugly sound, and wiped her face with the heel of her hand.
“He didn’t,” she said. “I did.”
She turned around. Up close, I could see she had done her makeup carefully and cried most of it off. She looked younger than thirty-one. She looked about nineteen.
“I wasn’t going to say that,” she said. “In there. I swear, Kelsey, I practiced in the car. I was going to come in and sit down and be nice and leave.”
“Then why did you?”
“Because I walked in and I didn’t know anybody.” She pressed her lips together. “The lady next to me asked if I was the new aide. And then you came in the door, and three people said hi to you by name. And Wyatt’s whole face just…”
She stopped.
“He lit up,” she said. “When he saw you. And I panicked. I thought, they’re all going to know. They’re all going to look at me and know exactly what I am.”
I did not say anything. Some things you let a person finish.
“I had him when I was twenty-five,” Brittany said. “I thought I was grown. I wasn’t. When he was two, everything went at once. I lost my job at the plant. I got with a guy I shouldn’t have.”
“I was drinking more than I should have. I missed visits. I missed his birthday. And I was so ashamed of missing them that I missed more.”
She picked the yellow flower up out of the fountain and shook the water off it.
“Cody never once said a bad word about me to anybody,” she said. “Did you know that? Not in front of the mediator. Not in front of my mom. He just took Wyatt and said, ‘Get better, Brit. He’ll be here.’ And I hated him for being that decent. That’s how messed up I was.”
“I’ve been sober twenty-two months,” she said. “I’ve been at Casey’s for a year and a half. I’m assistant manager now. I’ve got an apartment over on Third Street with a room for Wyatt, with a dinosaur lamp in it.”
“I know,” I said. “He told me about the lamp.”
She looked up at that.
“He talks about your place,” I told her. “He talks about the pizza from Casey’s. He talks about the lamp. He comes home on Sunday nights and he tells me everything.”
Her face did the slow crumple again.
“I saw that flyer in his folder,” she said, “and I thought, I’m his mother. I’m supposed to be the first one in that chair. I’ve never once been to anything at that school.”