The Daycare In The Farmhouse

“Weekend nights,” Lucille said. “Friday, Saturday, Sunday, seven to seven. We’ve been trying to fill that for fourteen months.”

Thirty-six hours in three nights. It would be a hard way to live. But I would be home all day Monday through Friday, and that was the only thing that mattered to me.

“I’ll take it,” I said.

“Do you want to know what it pays?”

“Lucille,” I said. “I’ll take it.”

The hospital said yes by noon. I filled out my application for the state that same afternoon, at the kitchen table, with Jodie sitting on my lap and a crayon in her fist, drawing on the back of the last page.

I will not pretend the license was easy. It was not hard like climbing a mountain. It was hard like a long list of small things that all had to be done in order.

Every piece of it cost something small. When I added it up at the kitchen table, the fees for the training, the fingerprints and the fire inspection came to two hundred and fifty dollars. I wrote the check slowly and signed it carefully.

It was the cheapest thing I have ever done that frightened me so much.

The licensing specialist came out on a Tuesday in the middle of September. Her name was Ms. Dvorak, and she was about my mother’s age, with reading glasses on a beaded chain and a clipboard she held like a hymnal.

She walked through my house for an hour and a half. She measured the kitchen. She checked the smoke detectors and the fire extinguisher. She opened every cabinet under the sink and made me put latches on all of them.

She checked the water in the bathroom. She checked my first aid kit against a printed list. She looked at the back stairs and told me I would need a gate at the top.

Then she followed me out the back door, and she stopped at the stock tank behind the machine shed. It was four feet deep, rusted at the seams, and still held about two feet of green water from the last rain.

Ms. Dvorak looked at it for a long time.

“That has to go,” she said.

“It’ll be gone tonight.”

“And the pond past the windbreak?”

“It’s a quarter mile off. The fence will go around the yard and keep everything on the near side.”

“Fence?” she said, and wrote something down. “What kind?”

I told her. Woven wire, four feet tall, thirty-eight posts, with a latch at the gate that a three-year-old could not work.

She looked at me over the top of her glasses. “Mrs. Prescott,” she said, “I have been doing this twenty-two years. People usually come to me with a nice idea. You came with a post count.”

Austin drained the tank that night with a hose and a shovel, standing in the dark in his rubber boots. He said nothing the whole time. When he was done, he stood looking at the empty tank with the water still draining out onto the grass.

I ran into Tamara once, in the middle of all of it. It was a Wednesday in late September, at the gas pump outside the Co-op, and neither of us had planned it. She was filling her gray Chevy. I was filling the truck.