The Form My Son Filled Out

It did not get angry. I half expected angry, because Drew gets his daddy’s quiet most days but he has a little of my own temper folded in. It did not get angry. It got young. It got about nine years old, the age he was when he broke the neighbor’s window and had to go knock on the door and say so. His ears went red. He picked up the pen on the chain and he looked at the form and then he looked at me holding a stranger’s baby, doing the useful thing, and his chin did something I had not seen it do since he was a boy.

“Mom,” he said again, low, just to me. “Mom, I’m sorry. What I said. What we said.”

“Fill out the form, honey,” I said, and I was not cold about it. I was not warm either. I was just a woman at her job. “The allergy section is the one people forget. Does Ella still have the dairy thing.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, she does.”

“Put it down, then. We keep the babies separate who have it. We’re careful here.”

He filled out the form. Brianne came up beside him and did the second one, and her hand was shaking a little, and she did not say anything to me and I did not make her. Cody was pulling blocks off the shelf in the corner and making a racket and it was the best sound in the world.

When Drew finished he set the pen down on its chain and he stood there a second like he wanted to come around the counter. But there is a counter for a reason, and the reason is that this is my place and not his kitchen, and I think he understood that, because he did not come around it.

“We’ll start them Monday?” he said.

“Monday’s good,” I said. “Drop-off’s between six-thirty and eight. I’m here at six-forty.”

He almost smiled. “I know you are,” he said. “You always were.”