The Stars on the Ceiling
When the street was dark I went in and lay down beside Piper on the new mattress, on top of the covers, under forty-one green-white stars that had started to glow.
She was not asleep. She had the rabbit under her chin.
“Mom,” she said to the ceiling. “Did you mean it? What you told Dalton’s mom?”
I had rehearsed this. I had a good beginning. It left me.
“No,” I said. “I said it, and it was wrong, and I’m sorry. Uncle Curt is not a babysitter. A babysitter gets paid and goes home. He’s your uncle, and he came for you every day for five years, and I said a small thing about him because I was embarrassed. I wasn’t embarrassed of him. I was embarrassed of me.”
Get a new story in your inbox every morning.
Facebook doesn’t show you every story we post. Our free newsletter does. Join 2,500+ readers.
She thought about it. “Are you still?”
“A little.”
“Okay.” She turned the rabbit over. “I heard it, you know. I was standing right there.”
“I know. I’m sorry you did.”
“Are you going to say it to him again?”
“I already did. Tonight. And I’m going to do something better than say it.”
“Okay.” After a minute, her hand found mine. “The stars are crooked.”
“They’re perfect.”
“They’re crooked,” she said, and fell asleep with her fingers in mine.
My Family
The first Tuesday after the move, I left the dental office at five on the dot and drove the forty minutes home with my hands tight on the wheel, not knowing what I would find. I had told myself he might not come. I had told myself I would not blame him.
His pickup was at the curb on Locust Street, the district logo on the door. Curt was on the front step with his boots off, and Piper sat beside him with her spelling words on her knees, reading them aloud while he held the list and pretended not to know the answers. He had picked her up at 3:20, as promised, and walked her the five blocks to the four-plex, and stayed.
He stood when he saw my car. “She’s got eight of ten,” he said, and put his boots on, and drove home. It was the plainest conversation we had had in a month, and I stood in the street afterward and was grateful for it.
The open house at Wellfield Elementary was the following Thursday. I asked Curt to come, the way he had told me to, as her uncle, and he said yes. I did not ask Dalton. I had ended it by phone the Monday after the game, and I will say for him that he took it like the decent man he is. I will also say I should have told him the truth in April.
The fifth-grade hallway smelled like floor wax and cider. Mrs. Oltmans, who has taught fifth grade for twenty-two years and has a way of looking at a child that makes the child sit up, was walking people along a corkboard of construction-paper drawings under a banner that read MY FAMILY.