The Daycare In The Farmhouse

We stood on either side of the pump island with the nozzles clicking, and neither of us looked up. The wind was blowing a plastic bag across the lot.

“Austin told Mom about the fence,” she said finally. She did not turn around. “It’s all over town.”

“I expect it is.”

“Are you trying to put me out of business?”

I took a moment with that. I looked at her across the pump island, a woman I had loved for eleven years, a woman who had held my daughter on the day she came home from the hospital.

“You have twelve spots,” I said. “I’m opening for five children. Four of them are ones you turned away.”

“I didn’t turn them away like that.”

“Tamara. Declan’s mother drives fifty-two miles a day.”

She flinched. I saw it. She stood there with her hand on the nozzle and her mouth moving a little, and I saw that she had a reason, and I saw that the reason was fear, and I saw that it did not matter at all to a boy who was humming into a plastic tractor in a stranger’s car.

“I was scared,” she said. Her voice cracked. “I’m allowed to be scared, Holly.”

“You’re allowed,” I said. “You’re not allowed to hand it to a four-year-old.”

The pump clicked off. I hung up the nozzle and I got in the truck. I did not slam the door. I did not look in the mirror. I think about that still. I just drove home.

The fence went up on the first Saturday in November.

I had planned for Austin and his brother-in-law and maybe one neighbor. What I had not planned on was that I would call the four mothers to say it was happening, just to tell them, and every one of them would say, “What time?”

I said it was just a work day. I said come if you want, and bring your kids, and bring gloves, and I will feed you.

By eight in the morning there were four pickups in our lane, and a fifth one coming up it from the county road.

It was a clear, cold day, the kind we get in early November in the Loup Valley, with a sky so blue it looked scrubbed. The cottonwoods along the creek were bare. The corn was off the neighbor’s field and the stubble stood in rows all the way to the horizon.

Chelsea got out first with a post-hole digger that belonged to her father, and Declan walked up the lane at her side holding the plastic tractor. Brooke Lindquist came next, carrying Waylon in a snowsuit, and a coffee can full of staples.

Tess Kucera’s father pulled in with a skid steer on a trailer and a roll of woven wire in the truck bed. He climbed down, shook my hand once, hard, and did not say a word, which is what a farmer does when he cannot say what he feels.

The Tilleys brought a hot dish, and Ada, bundled up so thick in a pink coat that only her round face showed.

Dot set up a long table in the yard with two thermoses, a roaster of chili, and four dozen cinnamon rolls. She wore her good flannel and a pair of cotton gloves, and she was already bossing everyone around by 8:15.

I want to tell you about the children, because that is the part that matters.