The Daycare In The Farmhouse

We had set out a few straw bales along the fence line for seats. Jodie climbed up on one first and sat there kicking her heels. Then Tess Kucera came over on her braces, slowly, one swing of the leg at a time, and Jodie scooted over to make room.

Waylon wheezed a little in the cold air, and Brooke had him puff on his inhaler without turning her head from the post she was holding. He sat down on the straw and took Jodie’s other mitten without asking.

Then there was Declan.

Declan stood at the edge of the yard with his plastic tractor, and he would not come close to the bales. His mother had told me about this. He hates a crowd. He hates a new place. He hates a loud noise, and a tractor engine is a loud noise, and a skid steer is worse.

Chelsea watched him from the post-hole digger, with that look on her face I recognize from a hundred nurses’ stations. It is the look of a mother measuring how much she can afford to hope.

Jodie looked at him across the yard. Then she did something I will keep in my pocket for the rest of my life.

She climbed off the bale, walked across the grass, and stopped in front of him. She did not say a word. She held out her hand, palm up, the way you offer a dog a sandwich.

Declan looked at that hand for a long time. The humming stopped.

Chelsea put down the digger. She straightened up slowly, and I watched the color go out of her face.

He took it. Declan, who had never in his life let a stranger touch him, put his small fist into my daughter’s hand. Together they walked back across the grass to the bales and sat down beside Tess, side by side in a row with their feet swinging.

Nobody said anything. Nobody moved. Twenty feet away, a grown man with a post driver stopped in the middle of a swing and stood looking at his boots.

Chelsea sat down in the grass, right where she was, and wrapped both arms around her knees.

I went and sat beside her. I did not say anything either. I just put my arm around her and we watched the two kids on the straw, not talking, with the sun on their faces.

“He never,” she said finally. “He has never.”

“I know.”

Around ten-thirty, a truck I knew turned in at the mailbox.

It was a white Ford with a toolbox across the bed, and a second pickup right behind it. I watched them come up the lane slowly, throwing dust.

They were not any of the four. They were the Vogels and the Hendrickses, and both of them had children enrolled at Tamara’s daycare that very morning.

Cecil Vogel got out first, and he stood for a moment with his hand on the door. He is a big man who runs the feed store, with a rancher’s slow way of walking. His wife Stacy climbed out of the passenger side with a four-year-old named Mason, who was holding a blue thermos.

Zane Hendricks and his wife Amy came out of the second truck. Zane had an auger on a power take-off hitched behind, and I did not know until later that he had borrowed it from the feed store.