The Paper Flower He Carried Across the Room
A couple of the moms looked at her funny. But Grandma Joan, Emma Berg’s grandmother, who is about eighty and has outlived most of the people she ever argued with, reached over and patted Brittany’s arm as she went by.
“Took some nerve, honey,” Grandma Joan said. “Both ways.”
Wyatt stood beside his little chair looking at the two of us with a very serious face.
“Are you guys fighting?”
“No, buddy,” Brittany said.
“No,” I said.
He thought about that. Then he pointed at the chair, and then at the floor beside it, like he was the one in charge of seating.
“There’s only one chair,” he said.
Brittany looked at me. I looked at her.
Then she set her purse down on the little blue chair, and she sat down on the floor.
So that is how the tea ended. Brittany cross-legged on the floor on one side of Wyatt’s chair, me on the other. Wyatt in the middle like a little king, eating the rest of his cookie and then half of hers and then half of mine.
He showed us his butterfly. He showed us his letter-B worksheet with a drawing of a bear on it. He showed us both his loose tooth, which I had already seen about forty times, and Brittany had not.
“That’s a good one,” Brittany said. “That’ll be out by Monday.”
“Mama Kels says Tuesday.”
“Mama Kels is the expert,” Brittany said, and he laughed, and for a minute all three of us were just three people on a cold floor laughing at a tooth.
At 2:30 the bell rang for dismissal. Brittany had to be at Casey’s for the 3:00 shift.
At the door, she hugged Wyatt, then straightened up and looked at me like she was not sure if she was allowed.
“Thank you,” she said. “For not saying anything in there. When you could have.”
“Call Cody tonight,” I said. “Don’t text him. Call. Tell him about today yourself. He’ll want to hear it from you.”
She nodded. She was holding the yellow flower so carefully you would have thought it was made of glass.
Then she left, and I watched her through the window walk across the parking lot to an old silver Malibu and sit behind the wheel for a long time without starting it.
I picked Wyatt up from after-school care at 5:00, after my last two patients. He fell asleep in the car before we got to the stoplight on Main.
Cody’s truck pulled in at 9:40 that night. I heard the diesel idle in the driveway for a minute, then cut off. He came in through the mudroom smelling like rain and two-stroke oil and sweat, still in his hard boots and his orange high-visibility shirt, so tired he looked about fifty.
“Lights are back on out past the county line,” he said. “Six hundred and some. How was the tea?”
I made him sit down first. I heated him up a plate of hot dish. And then I told him the whole thing, from the doorway to the floor to the hallway to the parking lot.
Cody did not say anything for a long time. He set his fork down.
“She called me,” he said finally. “About two hours ago. I was up in the bucket. I listened to the message on the way home.”
“What did she say?”
He got out his phone and played it on speaker. Brittany’s voice, quiet, a little hoarse.