The Daycare In The Farmhouse

Tamara stood in her kitchen doorway with Jodie’s cubby bag already zipped and sitting on the bench beside her. It was 6:40 on a Monday morning, and I still had my scrubs bag on my shoulder.

“I can’t keep her, Holly,” she said.

She did not say hello. She did not say, can we talk. She said it the way you read a number off a receipt.

Jodie was on my hip, three years old and sticky from the banana she had eaten in the truck. She lifted her hand and waved at her aunt with all five fingers, the way she waved at everybody.

“Bye bye, Aunt Tamara,” she said, as if it were any other Monday.

Tamara did not wave back. She looked at the bag on the bench instead.

Jodie had been coming to this house three mornings a week since June. She loved the sandbox under the maple, and she loved a big girl named Sheila who had taught her the sign for more. The full-time spot was supposed to start in two weeks.

So was my job. After three years at home, I was going back to the county hospital on day shift, and the first real paycheck I had seen since Jodie was born was due on the fifteenth of September.

“Is this about her heart?” I asked.

Jodie was born with a hole in it. They fixed it when she was five months old, and nothing had touched it since. Her cardiologist in Omaha had signed a paper last spring that said she could run, climb and fall off a swing like any other kid.

“It’s the insurance,” Tamara said. “The renewal came back a hundred and forty dollars a month higher. The agent said a child with needs does that.”

She said it fast, like she had practiced it in the shower. I noticed her hands were shaking a little around her coffee cup.

“And if something happens on my watch, Holly, it all lands on me. I’m not trained for it. I’m not.”

I want to tell you what I did, because people ask. They ask why I did not argue, why I did not call someone, why I did not say the things I was thinking.

I knew the law did not let her do this. I knew that much. I also knew that a complaint takes months, and my first shift was in fourteen days. And I knew I would never leave my daughter all day with a woman who had to be made to take her.

So I did not say any of it. I picked the cubby bag up off the bench and said, “Thank you for the three months.”

Tamara looked at me then, and for a second I thought she might say something else. She did not.

My husband’s sister is thirty-six years old. She runs the only licensed daycare in Elmore, Nebraska, in the old brick house on Third Street with twelve spots and a waiting list. The next daycare is twenty-six miles away in the county seat, and it has been full since the spring.

I buckled Jodie into her car seat. She watched Tamara’s kitchen window all the way down the street.

“Why we go home?” she asked.

“Because we have a new plan,” I said.