The Daycare In The Farmhouse

I did not have a plan. I drove to the end of Third Street, pulled over beside the grain elevator, and sat there gripping my knees until my hands stopped doing what they were doing.

Austin was ninety miles away that morning. He is a lineman for the public power district, and a windstorm had gone through the Loup Valley over the weekend and taken down forty poles.

He had been up on a ladder truck since four. I knew better than to call him. A man on a pole needs his mind on the pole.

So I called his mother instead. Dot is seventy-one and cooked in the school kitchen for twenty-nine years. She picked up on the first ring and said, “What is it, honey?” before I had said one word.

I told her. There was a long quiet on the line, and then I heard her put something down hard on the counter.

“Bring that baby here,” she said. “I’ll make pancakes.”

Dot’s kitchen smells like coffee and lemon furniture polish, and it has smelled that way since before Austin was born. Jodie ate three pancakes and told Dot all about the sandbox.

Dot cut the pancakes into small squares, the way Jodie likes them, and did not ask me one question until Jodie was asleep on the couch under the afghan.

“Did Tamara say why?”

“Insurance. A hundred and forty dollars a month.”

Dot nodded slowly and looked at her coffee. “She was always the scared one,” she said. “Austin would climb the water tower and Tamara would stand at the bottom and cry. She never got over it.”

“That doesn’t make it right.”

“No,” Dot said. “It doesn’t.”

She did not defend her daughter. I will always remember that. She did not say one word to make it smaller than it was.

Austin called at noon from a gas station in Ord, still in his hard hat, and I told him the whole thing in about ninety seconds. He did not say anything for so long that I checked to see whether the call had dropped.

“I’ll be home Thursday night,” he said finally. “Don’t do anything big until I get there.”

“I won’t.”

I did something small instead. On Wednesday morning I went to the hardware store for a box of mousetraps, because the mice come into our farmhouse every November like they have an invitation.

Chelsea Hahn was in line ahead of me with a box of the same traps and a little boy on her hip. The boy was Declan, who is four. He was holding a plastic tractor in both fists and humming one low note, over and over.

Declan does not talk. He has not said a word yet, though he hums constantly, and his mother can tell you what each hum means.

“Holly,” Chelsea said. “I heard about Jodie. I’m so sorry.”

“News moves fast.”

“Tamara’s cousin is my hairdresser.” She shifted Declan higher on her hip. “She told us in March, you know. Tamara did. Said she couldn’t be responsible for him. I’ve been driving him to my mother in Fullerton four days a week ever since. It’s fifty-two miles round trip.”

I stared at her. “In March?”

“She said it very nicely.”

I will tell you that something went very still in me, standing in that aisle beside the extension cords. I am not a person who gets angry fast. I get quiet. Austin says it is more dangerous.

“Who else?” I said.