The Form My Son Filled Out

My First Day

I started the last Monday in January. Roy dropped me at the education wing door at six-forty, same as always, except now the door was a different door, and he squeezed my hand before I got out.

“Knock ’em dead, Phyl,” he said.

The Sonshine Room smelled like baby lotion and Cheerios and that pink soap in the pump bottles. Pam had me shadow her for an hour, but there was not much to show me. I knew where the bottles went. I knew how to test the warm milk on my wrist. I knew how to hold two at once, one in the crook of each arm, and sway so neither of them knew the other was getting swayed too.

By nine o’clock I had a baby named Beau asleep on my chest and a little girl named Harper patting my knee wanting up, and Pam stood in the doorway with her coffee and watched me.

“Lord,” she said. “You haven’t lost a thing.”

I had not. That is the part Brianne got wrong, you see. The useful part of me was not in my knees or my hair. It was in my hands and it was in the low humming I do without thinking, the same three notes my own grandmother hummed, and babies go quiet for it the way they have for a hundred years.

They paid me twelve dollars and seventy-five cents an hour. It was not a fortune. Across two weeks it came to a little under a thousand dollars, and the first check I got I sat in the truck and looked at it for a minute before I folded it into my purse. I had not had a check with my own name on it since before Drew was born. I had forgotten what my own name looked like printed by somebody who owed it to me.

I did not do it for the money. But I will tell you, the money was not nothing. The money said a thing out loud that my family had spent three years keeping quiet.

The Enrollment Form

Now here is where I have to tell you about the form, because the form is where this story turns, and I did not plan it. I want that understood. I did not take the job to teach anybody a lesson. I took it because my arms were empty and Pam asked.

But the Sonshine Room was the only church daycare in town, and it had a waiting list, and the center over in Jasper that Drew had picked had a problem. It closed. Not slowly. The state came through in February and found something about the exits and the ratios, and by the end of the month it was shut, and every family in it was scrambling, and that included my son.

I found out the way you find out everything in a small town, which is that Roy heard it at the feed store before I heard it from Drew. Drew did not call me. Of course he did not. He had told his mother she was too old to be useful at Christmas, and now in March he needed daycare in a hurry, and I expect it sat in his throat like a chicken bone.

So he did what everybody in town does when they need a safe place for a baby. He called the church.

Pam told me he was coming. She came and found me in the infant room on a Thursday morning with that look on her face, half worry and half something else.

“Phyllis,” she said quiet. “Your Drew called the office. He’s bringing the two little ones to enroll. He’s coming at ten to fill out the paperwork.” She paused. “Did you want to not be here for that. I can put you on the toddler side, nobody would think a thing.”

I had Ella’s old spot in my arms right then, a different baby but the same spot. I thought about it. I will not pretend I did not think about it. There was a part of me, I am not proud of it, that wanted to be somewhere he could not see me, so it would not look like I had done any of it on purpose.

But then I thought, no. I am the lead caregiver on the infant side. The infant side is where his baby goes. If I hide in the toddler room so my own son does not have to look at me doing my job, then he is right. Then I am ashamed of being useful, and I am not.

“I’ll be here,” I said. “I work here, Pam.”