The Lawn Chair at the Bus Stop
“Thanks, Ash,” I said.
That was all I said. She was out the door in two minutes, the way she always was.
I made grilled cheese. I gave Lexi her bath. I sat on the edge of her bed with the lamp on and brushed out her curls while she complained.
“Baby,” I said. “When Aunt Ashley picks you up, what time does she come?”
Lexi thought about it seriously, the way she thinks about everything.
“After the buses,” she said. “There’s seven buses. I count them. When all the buses are gone, then Miss Barb lets me sit on the curb part instead of the bench, and then Aunt Ashley comes.”
“Is it a long time?”
She shrugged. “Sometimes my bottom gets cold.” Then she brightened. “Miss Barb has gum. But I’m not allowed to tell.”
I kissed her on the head and turned off the lamp and went out to my kitchen and stood at the sink with both hands on the edge of it for a very long time.
I was not a saint that night. I was so angry I could taste metal.
I had paid my sister three hundred and sixty dollars to leave my daughter on a curb, and she had texted me “home” every single one of those days, and I had read it at my station between patients and smiled.
Mama used to say there is a kind of anger that helps you and a kind that only helps you feel better. She said the second kind is the one you have to sleep on.
So I slept on it. Badly, but I did.
In the morning, the anger was still there, but it had gone cold and quiet, and cold and quiet is easier to think with.
The problem was not, at that moment, my sister. The problem was a six-year-old who needed somebody at 3:15, and a mother who could not leave a dental chair, and a school that, thank the Lord, would not hand my child to just anybody who walked up.
I asked Dr. Miller if I could leave at 2:45 on Thursday and Friday. His wife teaches third grade over in Huntingburg. He didn’t even ask why.
“Go,” he said. “Linda and I will manage.”
So I picked Lexi up myself those two days. Ashley texted Thursday at noon, “On my way at 3!” and I texted back, “I’ve got her today, thanks.” She sent a thumbs up.
That gave me two days. I needed a plan by Monday.
Mrs. Irene Harlan has lived next door to me for the whole six years I have been in that house. Her husband, Walt, had been gone nineteen years, and her son lived in Arizona.
She was 81 that fall. She taught first grade at our elementary school for thirty-four years, back when it was still the old brick building before they built the new one in the nineties. Half the town learned to read in her room.
She wore her white hair in a bun every day of her life, as far as I know. She had a whole closet of cardigans, and she grew tomatoes and green beans along her side fence, and every summer she left a paper sack of them on my porch without knocking.
I had never asked her for anything. She was 81. I told myself she had done enough for this town.