Chapter 4: Off the List
Little Acorns is six minutes from our house. I made it in four.
Ben stayed with Lily. He didn’t argue. He said, “Go,” and then, when I was already out the door, he said something else I didn’t catch.
Linda was sitting on the little bench in the lobby under the paper turkeys the kids had made, a pink gift bag on her knees. She’d had her hair done. She stood up when she saw me and smoothed her twinset.
“Well,” she said. “There she is.”
Gloria hovered behind the front desk with the face of someone who’d been doing this job a long time and recognized trouble.
“Gloria,” I said, without looking away from Linda. “I need to update Lily’s pickup list. Effective right now.”
“Of course, Mrs. Hollis.”
“Linda Hollis is off it. Not authorized for pickup, not as an emergency contact, not for visits. If she shows up, please call me, and if I don’t answer, call Ben.”
Linda’s mouth opened. “You can’t do that.”
“I just did.”
“I’m her grandmother.”
“You’re the woman who planned for two weeks to cut my daughter’s hair while I was getting a mammogram.”
She actually flinched. Then her chin came up.
“Is that what this is? Amy showed you a little joke?”
“Kate won’t know until it’s done.” I said it the way she’d typed it, with the little wink in my voice. “That’s not a joke, Linda. That’s a plan.”
The lobby was very quiet. A dad holding a toddler’s hand stopped by the cubbies, pretending to look for a mitten.
Linda sat back down on the bench. All at once she looked her age.
“Do you know,” she said, “what it was like when Ben was a baby? His father’s mother lived with us. Two years. She gave him his first bath. His first haircut. His first birthday cake, she made it, she decided. I wasn’t allowed anything. Every single first, that woman took.” She smoothed the gift bag on her lap. “I swore I’d have my turn. With my grandchildren. I swore it.”
“So you took mine.”
“I was going to share it. I made a page.”
For one awful second I understood her. I saw a young mother in a kitchen, watching someone else cut her baby’s hair, swallowing it because that’s what you did. I thought about how many times I’d swallowed things for three years, at Easter, at the Fourth, because Ben said ignore her.
And I thought about how I’d almost not asked her to babysit at all. I’d had a feeling. I’d called anyway, because it was easier, because I was scared about the mammogram and I didn’t want to be alone with it, and Linda had said of course, honey. Some part of me had known, and I’d handed my daughter over anyway.
“You don’t get to make up for what someone took from you,” I said, “by taking it from me.”
“My lawyer—”
“Have him call mine.”
I didn’t have a lawyer yet. Linda didn’t need to know that.
I walked out to the parking lot with my legs shaking and leaned against the car, one hand flat on the cold roof. Across the lot I could see her through the glass doors, still on the bench, holding the pink gift bag with both hands.
My phone buzzed. Ben.
Is it done? Are you okay?
I called him back. “She’s off the list. She’s talking about her lawyer again. Ben, I’m going to need you to back me up on this. All the way. If this goes to court, I need you to say she’s not safe to leave Lily with.”
There was a long silence. Too long.
“Ben?”
“Kate.” His voice sounded wrong. Thick. “Before you see a lawyer, there’s something I have to tell you. Something I should have told you last summer.”
My stomach dropped.
“When you were at your cousin’s wedding. When Mom had Lily for the weekend.” He took a breath. “She drove her to the lake. Forty minutes on the highway. No car seat. Lily was buckled into the front seat with a regular belt.”
I couldn’t speak.
“Mom told me afterward, like it was a funny story,” Ben said. “And I knew. I knew, and I never told you.”
