Six Cribs in My Living Room
The note on Pam Kauffman’s front door was written on the back of a lunch menu, and the tape had already let go at one corner in the cold.
It flapped a little every time the wind came down off the ridge.
I read it with Owen on my hip and my car still running behind me in the gravel lot. Closed until further notice.
I am so sorry. Pam. That was all of it, in the same round handwriting that had signed his birthday card at church two weeks before.
It was 6:35 on a Wednesday morning, the third of December. My shift on the medical floor at the hospital in Lewistown started at seven, and it was six miles down Route 322 with frost on every windshield in Mifflin County.
Owen was ten months old. He had his blue hat pulled down over his ears and his diaper bag was hanging off my shoulder, packed the night before the way it always was, two bottles, three diapers, the stuffed cow he would not nap without.
I knocked anyway. Then I knocked harder. The kitchen light that was always on by six, because Pam liked to have the oatmeal going before the first baby came through the door, was dark.
So was the whole addition out back where the cribs were.
Behind me, headlights swung into the lot one after another. Lauren’s minivan. Stephanie’s little car with the cracked bumper.
A pickup I knew belonged to one of the dads from the Belleville side of the valley. Then three more.
Lauren got out first, her son Wyatt bundled in her arms like a sack of flour. She saw my face before she saw the note.
“What,” she said. Not a question really. Just the word, flat, the way you say it when you already know it is bad.
I pulled the menu off the door and handed it to her. She read it twice. Then she took her phone out of her coat and called Pam, and I watched her listen to it ring and ring and go to the message that said Pam’s sweet voice was sorry she missed you.
By 6:45 there were eleven cars in that lot. Fourteen families used Pam’s. Three of them had not come yet.
We stood there in the cold holding babies and diaper bags, and nobody knew what to say, because nobody had ever needed to say it before.
Pam Kauffman had watched babies in that converted farmhouse in Reedsville for nineteen years. She taught the toddler Sunday school class at our church.
She had held half the children in that parking lot when they were still in the hospital blanket.
And on Monday, December first, every one of us had handed her a check for six hundred and forty dollars for December. I knew mine had cleared, because I had checked my account Tuesday night like I always did, standing at the kitchen counter while Owen banged a spoon in his high chair.
Six hundred and forty dollars, times fourteen families. Stephanie did the math out loud in the parking lot, because Stephanie always does the math out loud.
“That’s almost nine thousand dollars,” she said. “That’s eight thousand nine hundred and sixty dollars, and she’s gone.”
Nobody yelled. I want to say that clearly, because later people asked me if there was a scene. There was no scene.