Six Cribs in My Living Room

There were fourteen mothers and a couple of fathers who had to be at work in fifteen minutes and had nowhere to put their children.

I called my charge nurse from the car with the heater blowing on Owen’s feet. I told her I would be late, and then I told her I did not know how late, and then I told her I did not know about tomorrow either.

My husband, Nate, drives a plow for PennDOT out of the Lewistown shed. In December he works twelve-hour shifts whenever it snows, and sometimes when it only looks like it might.

He was already out on 322 that morning, salting the bridge decks, because the forecast had turned overnight.

My mother lives in Altoona and works days at a pharmacy counter. Nate’s mother passed three years ago, the spring before we got married.

There was nobody standing behind us. That was the whole reason we had paid Pam six hundred and forty dollars a month without blinking, because she was the somebody.

I drove Owen home to our row house on a narrow side street in Lewistown, carried him up the four concrete steps, and called off my whole shift.

Then I sat on the couch with him asleep on my chest and stared at the wall until lunchtime.

By that afternoon the parents had a group text going, all fourteen families and then some aunts and grandmothers. It filled up fast.

Dale was Pam’s husband. He had had heart surgery down in Hershey that summer, a bypass, and we had all signed the card and made the casseroles.

He was back at church by September, thinner, sitting in the end of the pew so he could get up and walk when his legs got stiff.

On Thursday, Lauren called the state police. Pam’s place was out in Brown Township, which has no police department of its own, so it was a trooper from the Lewistown barracks who came out to Lauren’s kitchen that evening and took statements from eight of us.

He was young, maybe thirty, with a wedding ring and a patient way of writing things down. He did not make us feel foolish for paying in advance.

He said a lot of people pay daycare in advance. He said that was how it was supposed to work.

Then he put his pen down and told us the honest part. “I’ll do everything I can on this,” he said. “But I want you to hear me. Even if it goes the way you want, any money coming back to you takes months. Some of these, it’s a year.”

Stephanie laughed, not because anything was funny. “A year,” she said. “I have twins. Pam always charged by the family, not the baby, so it was six hundred and forty for both of them, and it was every dollar I had. My babies need somewhere to be on Monday. Not in a year. This Monday.”

So we did the next thing. We called every licensed center in the county. I called the one in Lewistown, the one by the hospital, the one in Burnham, and the church one in Milroy.

Lauren called the ones out toward Mifflintown. Every single one had a waiting list for infants.

The center closest to the hospital told me they had eleven babies on the infant list ahead of Owen. The woman on the phone was kind about it.

“Infants are the hardest spots,” she said. “We can only take four per teacher. I wish I had better news, honey. I could put you on for February.”