The Daycare In The Farmhouse

Dot went by herself on Christmas Day with a plate of cookies. She stayed an hour. She came home and sat at the table with her coat on, and she said, “She’s my daughter too, you know.”

“I know,” I said.

“She’s still my daughter.”

“I know she is, Dot.”

Dot did not say anything else for a while. Then she took off her coat, hung it on the hook, and went to see whether the baby had woken up.

I do not hate her. I tried, for a few weeks, and it did not work. It is too heavy to carry and too small to fill a life.

But I do not forget it either.

Here is what my days are like now. At 6:30 the pickups start coming up the lane, one by one, with their headlights on in the dark, and the frost glittering on the posts. Dot meets them at the gate in her good apron and says the same thing to every child.

“Come in, honey. It’s warm.”

At nine Waylon takes his breathing treatment at the kitchen table, and Jodie sits beside him and holds the mask steady, because she decided it was her job. At ten, Tess does her stretches on the mudroom rug, with Jodie counting wrong on purpose to make her laugh.

Ada took her first steps in March, holding the fence, between the gate and the first post.

Declan said his first word in April. I was standing at the sink, drying a cup. He was at the window with his tractor, and Jodie was in the yard below him, waving up at the glass with all five fingers.

“Jo,” he said.

That was it. That was the whole word, small and cracked, like something that had been waiting a long time behind a door.

I put the cup down very carefully. I did not turn around. I stood there with my back to the room and my hands flat on the counter, and Dot came up beside me and slipped her hand into mine.

Chelsea was on her way to pick him up that afternoon. I met her at the gate, at the end of the day, with the sun going down gold over the cedar windbreak, and I told her. She did not say anything. She just stood in the lane holding on to the fence, the one she helped build, until the tears quit.

Then she walked up to the house, to get her son.

The fence is still there. Austin checks the posts every spring after the frost heaves, going down the line with a mallet. The latch has been replaced once. The gate swings easy, and it clicks shut every time.

The stock tank is gone. Austin hauled it to the scrap yard in November. Where it stood there is a sandbox now, with a maple sapling beside it that Dot and the children planted, and a rope swing hanging from one low branch.

On Fridays I leave for my night shift at a quarter to seven. I drive past the end of the lane and look back once, at the yard light on, and the gate, and the small boots lined up on the porch.

Jodie stands at the window every time I go. She is four now, taller, with her hand pressed flat on the glass.

She waves with all five fingers. She waves like it is any other day.

I wave back.