The Daycare In The Farmhouse

Cecil walked across the yard toward me. He was twisting his cap in his hands.

“Holly,” he said. “We heard about the fence.”

“I figured.”

“We were in town for coffee. Zane and I got to talking.” He cleared his throat. “Heard what happened with Jodie. Heard about the others, too. I want to say something.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I do,” Cecil said. “I’ve been a customer of that daycare for three years. It’s a good place. Tamara’s good with Mason. But I’ve been standing in my feed store all week trying to figure out what I’d do if it was him.”

Stacy stepped up beside him. She is a short, quiet woman with a nurse’s aide’s strong forearms, and she had Mason by the hand.

“I lay awake Tuesday night,” she said. “Over those four kids. I kept thinking, what if it’s mine next year? What if Mason has a seizure someday, or something nobody saw coming? Would she keep him then?”

She looked at Dot, who was cutting cinnamon rolls, and then back at me.

“I don’t know what I’m doing here, exactly,” Stacy said. “I just know I couldn’t sit at home.”

“We brought the auger,” Zane said. He sounded gruff about it, the way a man does when he is embarrassed. “Where do you want holes?”

I pointed him to the north fence line, and he went.

I did not say anything about Tamara. I did not say anything at all, because I was too grateful to say anything sensible. I handed Stacy a cup of coffee, and she took it, and she stood beside me watching her son climb up on a straw bale.

By three that afternoon the fence was done.

Thirty-eight posts, four feet tall, woven wire as tight as a drum, and a gate on the south side with a latch set up high, where only a grown-up could reach. Austin hung it himself and swung it back and forth a dozen times, listening to it click.

The licensing specialist came back on the tenth of November, with her clipboard and her reading glasses on the beaded chain. She walked the whole fence, and she shook the gate twice, and she tried the latch with her own hand and then asked Jodie to try it.

Jodie pulled on it, frowning, with her whole body. It did not move.

“Well,” Ms. Dvorak said. She wrote something down. She looked at me over her glasses, and for a moment she did not look like a licensing specialist at all.

“I’ll have it in the mail Thursday,” she said.

The license came in a long white envelope on the thirteenth. I will not tell you what I did when I opened it. I will only tell you that Dot had to take it out of my hands and read me the first line.

We opened the following Monday, which was the seventeenth of November.

It was twenty-four degrees that morning, with a hard frost on every post and a white mist lying over the creek. I was up at five. I had the oatmeal on and the heat turned up, and I had put out five cubbies in the mudroom, with a strip of masking tape and a name on each.

Dot came at six, in her good apron.