The Daycare In The Farmhouse

“Is that her?” Tamara said finally, looking past me. “In the red coat.”

I turned and looked. Jodie was standing at the gate, up on her toes, with Declan beside her, both of them watching the road.

“That’s her.”

“She looks good,” Tamara said.

“She is good.”

Tamara gripped the steering wheel with both hands. I waited. I think I wanted her to say something, and I think she wanted to say it. I could see the words in her throat.

She did not say them.

“The gate’s latched,” I said. I said it quietly, the way you tell somebody the time. “It latches for everybody, Tamara. Any child who needs a place can have one here.”

I did not say it to be cruel. I said it because it was the truth, and because I had been carrying a long speech for eleven weeks and found, when I got there, that I only needed one sentence.

Tamara looked at the gate and then at her hands. Then she rolled the window up, put the Chevy in gear, and drove on toward town.

I stood there and watched her go until the car was just a shape. Then I turned around and walked back up the lane, to my kitchen, my coffee, my daughter and the four children I had come to love before I even met them.

The week after that, the Vogels came to see me.

Stacy and Cecil stood in my mudroom on a Tuesday evening with Mason between them. Cecil did the talking, with his cap in his hands, the way he does.

“We’re taking him out of Tamara’s,” he said. “End of the month.”

I did not know what to say. “You don’t have to do that on my account.”

“It’s not on your account.” Cecil shook his head. “It’s on mine. I couldn’t look at myself buying her feed contracts every month, knowing.”

“Is there room?” Stacy asked. “I know you’ve got the five. But Zane and Amy are looking too.”

I counted on my fingers. Eight was the limit with the small license, and I had five children. I thought about it for about as long as it takes to breathe.

“I have room for two more,” I said. “Seven is the most I’ll ever take.”

Both families moved their children that last week of November. Tamara’s enrollment went from eleven down to nine, and the two mothers who had been friends with Stacy since high school stopped waving at her in the church parking lot.

She let Sheila go in January. She had to. She could not pay the girl on nine children. It was hard on Sheila, who had been so good with Jodie, and it is the part I cannot make myself feel good about, even now.

I will not say Tamara deserved all of it. I will say she did something, plainly and knowing, and it came back to her the way weather comes back to a field. People in a small town talk. Not unkindly, mostly. They just remember.

Her insurance premium, I heard later, did not come down. It did not go anywhere. It stayed right where the agent had put it. The thing she had been so afraid of paying for was a thing she paid for anyway, only now she paid for it alone.