The Form My Son Filled Out

The Ad in the Bulletin

The Sunday after New Year’s, I was sitting in the third pew from the back at First Christian, where Roy and I have sat for thirty-one years, and I opened the bulletin to see what the week held.

There it was, under the prayer list and above the trustees’ meeting. The church ran a daycare in the education wing, had for years, the Sonshine Room they called it, and they were looking for a lead caregiver for the infant and toddler side. Experience preferred. Must pass a background check. Must love children. Paid position, hourly, with a stipend toward the state license hours.

I read it twice. Then I read it a third time while the organ played the offertory, and I did not put anything in the plate because I had forgotten to, which was not like me.

Pam Dillard ran the Sonshine Room. Pam and I had known each other since our own boys played Pee Wee ball. She found me in the fellowship hall after the service, by the big coffee urn, and I think she had been looking for me.

“Phyllis,” she said. “You saw the opening.”

“I saw it,” I said.

“I put it in there hoping you would.” She had her hand on my arm. “I heard Drew’s putting the little ones in a center over in Jasper. I thought to myself, that woman has forgotten more about babies than that center knows, and she is sitting out here with empty arms now.”

My arms were empty. That was the plain truth of it. For three years my arms had been full every weekday, and then the first week of January came and the house was so quiet I ran the vacuum just to hear something.

“I’m fifty-six, Pam,” I said. “They told me I’m too old to be useful.”

Pam Dillard is a big-hearted woman but she is not a soft one. She snorted. “Who told you that.”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“It does, but all right.” She squeezed my arm. “Come fill out an application. Monday. I’ll have the deacons move on it quick. We need you, Phyllis, I mean we truly need you. Carrie quit to have her own baby and I’ve been in that infant room by myself and I am sixty-one and my back is a disgrace.”

Roy drove me home. I told him about the ad at the kitchen table over the leftover ham.

“What do you think,” I said.

He thought about it the way he thinks about everything, turning it over like a part he is deciding whether to replace or clean up. “I think,” he said, “you’d be back at six-forty in the morning either way. Might as well be for money, and for a boss who says thank you.”