The Lawn Chair at the Bus Stop
The call came on a Wednesday in September, at 4:15 in the afternoon, while I was holding suction for a root canal.
My phone was face up on the counter behind me, the way Dr. Miller lets us keep it when we have kids in school. I saw the name of the elementary school light up and my stomach dropped before I even knew why.
Dr. Miller saw my face over his mask. He nodded once. Linda, the other assistant, slid into my spot without a word, and I stepped into the hall with my gloves still on.
“Ms. Pratt? This is Karen Dunn. I’m Lexi’s teacher.”
“Is she hurt? Is Lexi okay?”
“She’s fine. She’s right here with me. Her aunt just pulled in.” There was a pause, and I could hear car doors and a whistle in the background. “But I need to tell you something, and I’m sorry I didn’t call sooner.”
I leaned against the wall by the sterilization room. I could smell the autoclave and the wintergreen polish we use on cleanings. I remember that smell better than anything else about that hallway.
“Lexi has been sitting out on the pickup curb until about 4:15 three days a week,” Mrs. Dunn said. “Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Since right after Labor Day.”
“That’s not right,” I said. “Her aunt picks her up at 3:15. Every day.”
“Her aunt calls the office around 3:10 and says she’s running ten minutes behind. So the office keeps Lexi on the curb with the duty aide. Then it’s twenty minutes. Then it’s an hour.” She let out a breath. “Different people take the calls. Nobody put it together until I had curb duty myself this week and saw her out there for the third time.”
I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t.
“She doesn’t cry,” Mrs. Dunn said, softer. “She sits on the curb with her backpack in her lap and counts the buses as they leave. Today she told me Aunt Ashley is always just a little late. She said it like it was the weather.”
I thanked her. I told her I would handle it. I asked her, and my voice came out very calm, if there was a form I needed to fill out to change who picked Lexi up.
“There is,” she said. “The office won’t release a first grader to anyone who isn’t listed on her emergency card and her pickup form. And if you want her riding the bus instead, transportation needs its own form, with a grown-up named for the stop.”
I wrote it on the back of my hand with a pen from the front desk. Pickup form. Bus form. Grown-up for the stop.
Then I went back in, put on fresh gloves, and finished the root canal. My hands did not shake until I got out to the parking lot at 5:40.
Then they shook so hard I sat in my car for ten minutes before I could put the key in.
My name is Courtney Pratt. I was 31 that fall. I’ve been a dental assistant for nine years, the last six of them at Dr. Miller’s office in Jasper, which is about twenty-five minutes from our town if the grain trucks aren’t out.
My daughter, Lexi, was six and had just started first grade. She had curly blonde hair that would not take a brush without a fight, a pink backpack she picked out herself at the Walmart in Jasper, and a laugh that sounded like a screen door slapping shut.