The Aunt Who Took the Daycare Job

“She said it was eleven hundred a week.”

“It is,” I said. “That’s Patty’s rate. It’s the same for everybody.”

He stood there in the middle of the yellow room in his work jacket, a big man surrounded by little chairs, and I watched him do the math in his head.

I saw it land. Eleven hundred a week. Four kids. The same four kids. The same work.

“Josie,” he said, and stopped. He looked at the clock on the wall. He had traded for a late start at the plant that morning, and he was already going to be late.

“Go to work, Brandon,” I said. “They’re fine. I’ve got them.”

He looked at me for another second. Then he knelt down, which I had not seen him do in a long time, and he kissed each of the kids on top of the head, Wes last. And he left without saying anything else.

I won’t tell you that day was easy. It was my first day running a room, and I had eleven children by nine o’clock, and a second teacher named Amber who came in at eight-thirty to take the older ones down the hall for the morning.

Hunter cried when Amber took him to the preschool room, and I had to walk him down myself and sit with him at the puzzle table until he was settled.

Ella bit a boy named Carter over a toy truck. Wes woke up and wanted nobody but me for two hours.

But I want to say this plainly, because it surprised me. It was easier than any day at Brandon’s house. I had a second set of hands.

I had a lunch break. At two o’clock, I sat in Patty’s office and ate a sandwich with the door closed, and nobody needed me for thirty minutes.

And when my shift was over at five-thirty, it would be over. Somebody else would do the bath and the bedtime and the two o’clock bottle. For the first time in three years, I would get to go home.

At five-twenty, Kayla came through the front door in her laundry scrubs, with her coat open and her cheeks red from the cold.

Brandon came in behind her, still in his work jacket. They’d come straight from the plant together, I found out later, because Kayla had traded her Monday shift.

I brought the kids to the front in a line, the way we do, holding hands. Wes was on my hip.

The twins went straight to their mom, and Hunter went straight to his dad and grabbed his leg and started telling him about the puzzle with the fire truck.

Kayla went to the front desk. Patty had the first week’s bill printed and waiting.

Kayla took a checkbook out of her purse and wrote the check right there on the counter, standing up, and signed it, and tore it off.

Then, before she handed it over, she turned around and looked at me. She had the check in one hand and her pen still in the other, and Brandon was standing a step behind her holding Ava, and the whole front room went quiet the way a room does.

“Josie,” she said. “I need to say something, and I need him to hear it.”

Brandon didn’t move.

“Eleven hundred dollars,” Kayla said. She held up the check. “That’s one week. I sat at the kitchen table Friday and did the math, because nobody in our house ever did it. Three years, Josie. That’s a hundred and fifty some weeks. That’s about a hundred and seventy thousand dollars.”