The Aunt Who Took the Daycare Job

Patty took a bar off the plate and broke it in half. “Kayla said she would tell him,” she said.

“I don’t know if she did. I don’t know if she told him whose room it was, either. That’s between them. You just teach.”

I didn’t sleep much Sunday night. Not because I was cold. I lay in that warm bed and listened to the furnace kick on under the floor, and I kept thinking about Monday morning, and about the storm door.

Monday I was up at five, which felt like sleeping in. I put on my new lavender teacher smock over a white long-sleeve shirt and pulled my hair back in a ponytail, because babies grab, and I walked the four blocks to Little Acorns in the dark.

Patty was already there with the lights on and the coffee going. I unlocked my room and turned up the lights and walked the rug once, checking the corners of the cubbies and the latches on the cribs, the way I had been taught in my practicum.

The first family came at seven-fifty, a nurse dropping off a little girl in pink boots. The second came at eight.

I knelt on the rug and talked to each of them and helped them hang their coats on the hooks.

At ten past eight, the door opened again.

Hunter saw me first. He stopped dead in the doorway with his mouth open, and then he yelled, “Aunt Jo!” so loud the little girl in pink boots dropped her crayon. He came across the room at a dead run.

The twins were right behind him, yelling it too, “Aunt Jo, Aunt Jo,” the way they say everything, in stereo.

I got down on my knees on that rug and opened my arms and caught all three of them at once and nearly went over backwards.

Behind them, in the doorway, my brother was standing in his black hooded work jacket with the diaper bag in his hand and Wes in his car seat on the floor beside me. Wes was wide awake and quiet. Brandon was not moving at all.

He looked at the cubbies. He looked at the coats on the hooks, and the flowered rug, and the cribs along the back wall.

Then he looked at me, kneeling there in my smock with his three kids hanging off my neck.

He didn’t say anything. I don’t think he could have. I don’t think anybody had told him whose room it was.

Hunter pulled back from me and started digging in his backpack, the little green one with the frog on it.

He pulled out his blue tractor blanket, folded in half, and held it out to me with both hands.

“For you,” he said. “So you’re not cold anymore.”

I took it. I didn’t trust my voice, so I just nodded and put it around my shoulders like a cape, and Hunter grinned at me with all his teeth, and the twins wanted one too, and for a minute the whole room was just kids and noise.

Brandon came in then and crouched to straighten Wes’s car seat on the rug, very carefully, like it was full of eggs. He put the diaper bag in the cubby I showed him. He did everything slowly.

“Kay said Little Acorns,” he said finally, low, so the kids wouldn’t hear. “She said they had four openings. She didn’t say it was your room.”

“It’s my room,” I said.