Page 69 of Only for Tonight
“She usually likes to be held on the left side,” I tell Miss Tammy, who’s reaching for Ella. “And she has a stuffed pig she really loves. I packed him in the diaper bag, along with extra pacifiers and onesies and more socks; you can never have enough socks—”
I’m rambling. I know I’m rambling. Miss Tammy is smiling at me with the patient expression of a woman who has heard this speech from approximately four hundred parents.
“She’s going to be just fine,” Miss Tammy says, settling Ella against her hip. “We’ll call you if she needs anything.”
Ella looks at me. Then at Miss Tammy. Then back at me. Her face scrunches.
Oh no.
The cry starts small — that trembling lower lip, the wet eyes — and then builds into a full wail, arms reaching for me, fingers grabbing at the air between us. It’s the cry that says where are you going and why are you leaving me with this stranger, and it reaches into my chest and squeezes.
“She’ll settle in a few minutes,” Miss Joanne assures me. “They always do.”
I nod. Smile. Walk out of the room on legs that feel like they’re made of wet sand. Make it approximately eight feet down the hallway before I press my back against the wall and breathe through the urge to go back and scoop her up and take her home and never do this again.
She’s fine. She’s in a room full of professionals. She’s going to play with other babies and be stimulated and socialized and all the things the parenting books say she should be.
I wipe my eyes with the back of my hand and keep walking.
The preschool is nothing like the club.
This should be obvious. One is a place where small children learn the alphabet, and the other is a place where grown men pay twenty-two dollars for a beer while staring at bare skin. And yet the contrast is so sharp that it takes me most of the morning to stop marveling at it.
My coworkers — three other teachers, a director named Linda, and an aide named Grace who can’t be older than nineteen — greet me like a regular person. They show me the supply closet, explain the snack schedule, and hand me a laminated sheet with the daily routine and a lanyard with my name on it.
They smile at me, like I belong here.
My classroom is the Pre-K room — twelve four-year-olds who arrive in waves between 7:30 and 8:15, each one louder and more chaotic than the last. They have tiny backpacks, light-up sneakers, and strong opinions about everything.
A boy named Caleb announces within the first three minutes that he doesn’t like circle time, doesn’t like sharing, and doesn’t like Tuesdays. A girl named Priya shows me a rock she found in the parking lot and tells me it’s magic. Twins named Jack and Sam get into an argument about whether dinosaurs are real, which escalates until Jack is crying and Sam is hiding under a table.
I love them immediately.
I crouch down to Sam’s level under the table. “Hey. You okay under here?”
He peeks at me from behind his arms. “Jack says T-rexes aren’t real.”
“Well, they’re not alive anymore, but they were real a very long time ago.”
“See?” Sam shouts toward Jack. “TOLD YOU.”
“But,” I add, lowering my voice like I’m sharing a secret, “the important thing is that you and Jack both love dinosaurs. So maybe instead of arguing, you could draw your favorite ones together?”
Sam considers this. “Can I draw a pterodactyl?”
“You can draw whatever you want.”
He crawls out from under the table, grabs Jack’s hand, and they head for the art corner. Just like that. Crisis resolved.
Wow. How did I know how to do that?
Grace catches my eye from across the room and gives me a thumbs-up. I exhale.
I can do this. I can actually do this.
The morning flies. We do circle time (Caleb participates, grudgingly). We paint (Priya’s magic rock makes a cameo). We read a story about a caterpillar, and I do different voices for each character, and twelve four-year-olds laugh so hard that Caleb falls off his chair.
By snack time, I’ve been finger-painted on twice, asked approximately forty questions I don’t know the answers to, and called “Miss Ryleigh” so many times it’s starting to feel real.
