The Aunt Who Took the Daycare Job

She stopped. Her chin was shaking. Kayla is not a crier. I had seen her cry exactly twice, both times in a delivery room.

“You did that for a cot,” she said. “And we let you. I let you. I was so tired I never looked. I’m sorry. I’m not sorry like a card is sorry. I mean I’m sorry I never once said thank you, and I am saying it now. Thank you.”

She handed Patty the check. Then she turned back to me. “Sunday,” she said. “Come for supper. Not to babysit. I’ll cook. You’ll sit. Brandon will do the dishes.”

Behind her, Brandon set Ava down. He looked at the floor for a second, and then he looked at me. “I’ll do the dishes,” he said.

That was all he said, but he said it in front of Patty and Amber and two other mothers and a dad in a seed cap.

I didn’t say anything smart. I didn’t say “I told you so” or “about time.” I have thought about that moment a hundred times and I am glad I didn’t.

I just said, “I’ll bring the bars,” and Kayla laughed through her crying, and that was that.

Sunday, I walked to their house. It was twenty-six degrees, which felt like spring.

Kayla had made a roast with potatoes and carrots, and she made me sit at the table while she put the twins in their chairs, and she wouldn’t let me get up once, not even when Wes threw his cup.

After supper, Brandon did the dishes. All of them, the roaster too. Then he dried his hands on the towel and sat down across from me at the kitchen table, in the same chair he did his math in every night, and put a white envelope in front of me.

“There’s a hundred dollars in there,” he said. “There’ll be a hundred every Friday. Kay and I worked it out. It’s what we can do until the daycare bill comes down. I know it’s not the three years. I can’t do the three years. I don’t have it.”

I looked at the envelope. I didn’t pick it up.

“I sat at this table every night after they cut my overtime,” he said.

“I wrote down every bill in the house. The electric and the van and the gas and the groceries. Your heater was on there. Forty dollars. And you know what wasn’t on there?”

“What,” I said.

“You,” he said. “You weren’t on the list. Not what you cost us. What you saved us. I never wrote it down because I never thought of it. I thought of you as my little sister who needed a place to live. I never thought of you as the reason my kids were okay.”

He rubbed his face with both hands, the way our dad used to.

“Kay had to write it down for me,” he said. “Eleven hundred a week. I’ve been sick about it since Monday. I took your heat away to save forty dollars, Jo. Forty dollars. I don’t know what I was thinking. I wasn’t thinking. I was scared about money, and I took it out on the one person who never asked me for any.”

I could have said a lot of things. I could have told him about the ice on the water glass.