The Daycare In The Farmhouse

Chelsea did not even have to think. She counted on her free hand, looking out the front window at the street.

“Waylon Lindquist, he’s two, he’s got the nebulizer twice a day for his asthma. Tess Kucera, she’s four, she wears the leg braces. And the Tilley baby, Ada, who just turned fourteen months. She had her lip surgery, and she takes a special bottle.”

Four children. Four families. Each of them told no, quietly and nicely, one at a time, so that nobody ever stood next to anybody else and compared notes.

“Nobody ever put it together,” Chelsea said.

“Nobody ever asked,” I said.

I did not buy the mousetraps. I walked out and sat in the truck, and I did a thing I had not planned on. I got out my phone and I made a list.

By lunch I had phoned all four mothers. I told each of them the same thing, which was only that I might have an idea, that I did not know yet, and that I would call when I did.

Brooke Lindquist cried on the phone. She is a school bus driver, and she had been leaving Waylon with her husband’s grandmother, who is eighty-one and cannot lift him.

Tess Kucera’s father farms eleven hundred acres of corn and beans, and he said, “Whatever you need, you tell me,” in a voice that sounded like it was coming up from a well.

Then I drove home to our farmhouse, a mile and a half south of town, and I sat on the back step and looked at our yard.

Austin’s grandfather built the house in 1951. It has five bedrooms, a big kitchen with a table that seats ten, and a yard that nobody had used since Austin’s cousins moved away. There is a windbreak of cedars on the north side, and a stock tank behind the machine shed that had not held a cow in fifteen years.

I sat there until the sun went behind the cedars.

Austin got home Thursday night after nine, with grease to his elbows and hard hat marks still pressed into his forehead. I warmed up a plate of Dot’s casserole and told him the whole thing again, slowly, and showed him my list.

He read every name. He turned the paper over to see whether there was more on the back.

He did not say one thing about his sister. I noticed that, and I noticed that he noticed me noticing.

“How many kids does the state let you have?” he asked.

I stared at him. “What?”

“If you got a license. For the house. How many?”

“Eight,” I said. “With the small home license. Including your own.”

Austin looked out the kitchen window at the dark yard. The yard light had come on, and the cedars were standing in it like a row of men.

“Then we’ll need a fence,” he said.

I laughed, and then I cried a little, and Austin let me, and he did not say a word about it. That is the way he is.

The next morning I called my manager at the hospital, a woman named Lucille Sorensen who has been a nurse since before I was born. I told her my day shift would not work, and I asked her if there was anything left on the schedule that a person could do while her husband and mother-in-law watched a toddler.