The Aunt Who Took the Daycare Job

He looked at me with the serious face he gets, the one that looks exactly like our mom’s. He was four, and four-year-olds hear everything.

He had heard his dad in the garage the night before. I didn’t know that yet, but he had.

At seven o’clock, after the twins were in their high chairs and Wes was in his bouncer with a teething ring, I took my phone into the laundry room and closed the door and called the Little Acorns office.

Mrs. Ostrander answered on the second ring. She’s sixty, with short gray hair and reading glasses she wears on a beaded chain, and she has run that daycare out of a converted church building on the east side of town for almost thirty years.

“Josie Varner,” she said, before I had finished saying my name. “I wondered if I’d ever hear from you. How are those babies?”

“They’re good,” I said. “Mrs. Ostrander, are you still hiring?”

There was a pause. I could hear a child laughing in the background and somebody running water.

“I am opening a new room on Monday,” she said. “My state inspection cleared last week. I have the ratios figured and the cribs in and nobody to run it, because the girl I hired took a job at the hospital instead. Can you come in this afternoon?”

I asked Kayla’s neighbor, a retired lady named Joan who sometimes sat with the kids for an hour, to come over at two.

I took the minivan across town. It was still only eleven degrees and the heater in the van took the whole drive to put out anything warm.

Little Acorns smelled the way it always had, like crayons and graham crackers and the floor cleaner they mop with every night.

Patty walked me down the hall to the new room. It had been a Sunday school room when the building was a church.

Somebody had painted the walls a pale yellow. There were cubbies along one side with names not filled in yet, a row of hooks for winter coats, four cribs along the back wall, low tables, and a big rug with red and blue flowers swirled all over it.

“This is the welcome room too,” Patty said. “Every new child starts here the first morning, whatever age, until I split them out by age. You’d open at six-thirty. You’d be here first.”

She told me the pay, which was fourteen dollars and fifty cents an hour, forty hours a week, with a raise in six months if I took the child development courses she pays for.

It was more money than I had ever made in my life. It was more than I had made in three years put together.

“There’s one more thing,” she said. She took her glasses off and let them hang on the chain.

“Don and I have a room above our garage. It was my mother’s before she passed. It has its own bathroom and a little kitchen. It’s empty. It’s warm.”

I didn’t say anything for a minute. I was looking at the rug.

“You don’t have to answer now,” she said. “But I’d charge you two hundred a month, which is what the electric and water run, and you’d be doing me a favor, because Don worries about the pipes when nobody’s up there.”

“Mrs. Ostrander,” I said. “Why would you do that?”