The slip from the school nurse was taped across the zipper of my granddaughter’s lunch bag.
Two pencil lines. Says she feels FINE. Sent back to room 9.
Aubree is seven. She’s been sleeping in my back bedroom for six months, since the county finally let her come to me, and I could count her sentences on my two hands.
When she was three, she narrated every grocery trip out loud.
I called the school before I’d pulled the crusts out of her lunch bag.
The nurse told me Aubree came in bent over, holding her middle, and when she reached for the thermometer the girl pressed into the corner by the cot and wouldn’t let anybody close.
“She’d settled after a while,” the nurse said, “and we let her go back.”
I raised three kids, and her mother was the loudest of them. I know what that kind of quiet means, and I hate it.
Her file from the foster home said “oppositional.” Her last foster mother had told the caseworker she was a liar. Her teacher put “needs redirection” on a progress report in purple marker.
Every grown-up in her life wrote her down. NOT A SOUL asked her why.
And any time I reached across her at supper for the salt, she pulled her head in like a turtle.
Two weeks before that, I’d gone up to say goodnight and found her lamp off. She was sitting on the rug in the dark with a stuffed fox from a garage sale, staring at the closet.
Her cheeks were dry.
“Bug, what’s wrong?” I said.
“I’m fine,” she said. “I’m fine, Gram.”
Fine. The nurse’s word, coming out of her own mouth.
The caseworker said a doctor’s appointment could wait until the six-month review. I’d asked twice.
I emailed the school counselor and asked her to pull Aubree for ten minutes. She wrote back that Aubree was “adjusting really well.”
Nine days later there was a bruise high on her arm, above the elbow.
“I fell,” she said.
Fell where? She looked at her socks.
After she was asleep I dug through her backpack for a permission slip and found an old phone with a spiderweb crack across one corner. She’d brought it from the foster home, and it was still logged in to that woman’s account.
It had one saved voice message on it, from February.
I hit play in the hallway outside her door. A woman, cheerful, like she was calling about a haircut.
“Remember what we talked about, sweetie. Whatever happens here STAYS here.”
My legs went, and I sat down hard on the top step.
First thing next day I phoned the caseworker. She told me that family had already had one visit, and nothing came of it.
I called the police non-emergency line. The officer said a voice message wasn’t a crime, and he couldn’t open anything on that alone.
I carried the rocking chair into her doorway that night and sat in it until three-thirty, listening to her breathe.
The next day I skipped the bus and took her to school myself, east side of Council Bluffs. I didn’t stop at the front desk. I went straight to the nurse.
“I need your sign-in book,” I said.
The nurse had a little fan clipped to her monitor, blowing on a fake fern. She switched it off.
“Why?”
“Because Aubree has been trying to tell you something for weeks, and you keep handing her a slip and sending her back.”
She sat still a moment. Then she reached down to the drawer by her knee.
A green spiral notebook with a peeling price sticker on the front.
Her name ran down eight pages. Eight visits in three weeks, the same tidy print on every one. Tummy ache. No fever. Sent to class.
EIGHT TIMES.
The ninth page didn’t match.
It went on longer. Student requested door closed. Student states she is not allowed to tell grandma. Student said, “Uncle Darrell told me if I say anything I HAVE TO GO BACK.”
The nurse looked at me over her readers.
“I didn’t know what to do with it,” she said. “They tell us document it and return them to class.”
I couldn’t get a breath.
I walked out holding the notebook against me. From the hallway I phoned the caseworker. She said she’d put it in the file.
I called the officer back. He said someone would come by.
Then I walked to room 9. Aubree was at her desk coloring a cat green, and when she saw me in the doorway she set the crayon down like she’d been expecting me.
“Do I get to go now?” she said.
“You get to go now, bug,” I said.
We were at the office window when the assistant principal came out and stood in front of us.
“Ms. Kowalczyk. I need to talk to you about this morning in the nurse’s office.”
I looked at him.
“What happened in the NURSE’S OFFICE,” I said.
He folded his arms. “We have a procedure for records.”
Aubree was looking at the floor tiles.
“A procedure,” I said. “Good. Glad somebody here has one.”
I took her hand and hit the push bar with my elbow.
She didn’t buckle herself in. She sat in the back seat with the lunch bag on her lap, so I got in back next to her.
“Gram,” she said.
“I’m here, bug.”
“I did tell. I told the lady in the nurse room. She said she’d make it better.”
She was crying without any sound, tears all down her cheeks.
“She didn’t make it better,” Aubree said. “I TOLD HER and I TOLD HER.”
I hauled her over onto my knees and held her. She shook so hard I felt it through my coat.
I said it into her hair, over and over. “I’m sorry, bug. I’m sorry.”
She didn’t say anything else.
When we got home I called Gail at the county office that approved me to take her, and I told her everything. The phone. The message. The ninth page.
The line went so quiet I pulled the phone away from my ear and checked it.
“Brenda,” she said. “There’s something about that foster home nobody told you.”
A call in February
“Gail, I don’t know what that means.”
“I know.” Paper moved on her end of the line. “That home was family, Brenda. Darrell and Kim Strand. Darrell is Shane’s older brother.”
Shane. Aubree’s father. I’d met him twice in three years, and one of those times was at a gas pump.
“Her uncle,” I said.
“Her uncle.”
The cracked phone was on the counter next to the lunch bag. I held the side button until it lit, found the saved message, and read the date under it instead of playing it.
February 10.
“A call came in on that house in February, about a little girl crying,” Gail said. “A worker went out on the eleventh.”
The next morning.
Remember what we talked about, sweetie.
“And nothing came of it,” I said. They were the caseworker’s words, and they came out of me sounding just like her.
“And nothing came of it,” Gail said.
Aubree was on the couch where I’d set her down, shoes still on, the fox under her chin. The TV had a cartoon dog driving a fire truck. She was looking at the carpet.
“Brenda, the Strands have a boy,” Gail said. “Tyler. He’s nine.”
“Go on.”
“Aubree never changed schools. He didn’t either.”
I looked at the slip. It was still hanging off the lunch bag by one strip of tape.
“Which school, Gail.”
“Hers.”
The trash bag
Aubree came to me the first warm week of spring with everything she owned in one black trash bag.
The caseworker carried the bag up my steps. Aubree had both hands in her coat pocket.
It took me two years to get her onto those steps. A woman from the county measured my back bedroom with a tape measure and pushed the button on every smoke alarm I had. I got fingerprinted at the sheriff’s office. I sat through nine Thursday nights of class in a church basement with a binder on my lap.
Jenna was the loudest of my three, and somewhere in her twenties the loud went the wrong way. She lost Aubree the winter Aubree turned four.
I’d lost the both of them before that, the day she moved to Omaha with Shane and quit answering.
She’s in a program in Des Moines now. She calls Sundays, when they let her.
Every time I asked where Aubree was living, the caseworker said a licensed home. Good people.
I asked her for a name one time.
“Pushing won’t look good for you at the hearing,” she said.
I quit asking.
The day Aubree came, the caseworker set the trash bag down in my hall and gave me two things to remember.
“Keep her at her school. She’s had that school the whole time, and the foster family really pushed for it.”
I said I would.
“And the foster mom says she can keep the phone. She’s got her games on it.”
Aubree took her hands out of her pocket then. Old phone, spiderweb crack in one corner. It only worked on my Wi-Fi. She played a game where you popped bubbles, with the sound off.
There was a note in the bag, tucked inside a pair of socks. Purple ink, a smiley face.
She tells stories. Pick your battles! Kim
I didn’t know any Kim. I put it in my junk drawer.
She used to ride in the front of the cart at three and tell the whole produce aisle the brown bananas were the sweet ones. “The ugly ones, Gram.” Every single trip.
This year she let me pick whatever I wanted.
I had the four a.m. shift at the Hy-Vee bakery, nineteen years of it. Marlene next door walked Aubree to the bus at ten to eight, in her robe, coffee in one hand. I was back by twelve-thirty to meet the bus in the afternoon.
Six months, and I never once went inside that school. Whatever came home in the folder, I signed.
Gail said she’d make calls that night, and I wasn’t to call anybody named Strand.
“I don’t have their number,” I said.
Their phone was in my hand. I plugged it in next to the toaster.
Weller
The someone who came by was the same officer from the phone. Weller. He was younger than my youngest, and he sat at my kitchen table at nine the next morning with his hat on his knee.
I’d called the bakery at six and taken the week. Aubree was still asleep, past seven for the first time since spring.
He went through the green notebook with one finger and took a picture of every page. He stopped at the ninth page and read it twice.
“Darrell with two R’s?” he said.
“I’d never heard the name before yesterday.”
He wrote it down both ways.
He asked about the bruise. It had gone yellow by then. I’d circled the day I found it on the calendar by my phone, so I showed him that.
He asked if Aubree would talk to somebody. I said I didn’t know who she’d talk to anymore.
He put a card on the table and tapped the number on the back.
“He comes around here, you call this one. Skip the desk.”
The caseworker called at one.
I asked her to tell the school that Darrell Strand wasn’t to come anywhere near my granddaughter.
“Brenda, I had the assistant principal on the phone at eight this morning,” she said. “He says you walked out of that building with a student health record.”
“Her record,” I said.
“The school’s notebook. I have to put that in my notes. The review’s a week from Wednesday.”
“Did you know he was her uncle?”
“The Strands are her family too. They’ve asked to sit in on the review. They’d like visits.”
“Did you know,” I said, “when you told me nothing came of it?”
“I’m not getting into the Strands with you, Brenda.”
She said she needed the notebook at her office. I said I’d bring it to the review. She let that go by.
“And Brenda,” she said. “Darrell asked me for your address last week. I didn’t see any reason not to.”
Lemon bars
He came that night at a quarter after six.
Marlene’s wind chime was going next door, the one she made out of bent forks.
He was a big man in pressed khakis, holding a foil pan out in front of him like it was a potluck.
“Brenda? Darrell Strand. Shane’s brother.”
He put his other hand out. I kept mine on the door.
“Kim made lemon bars,” he said. “She’s sick over all this. We both are.”
He talked a while on my steps, easy, weight on one hip, the way men talk in a church parking lot.
Aubree was a sweet kid. She’d had a rough start. Kim had tried everything with her. Some kids, you couldn’t believe half of what came out of them, and that wasn’t their fault, that was what they’d been through.
I didn’t say anything. He didn’t need me to.
“Here’s the thing,” he said. “Kim’s old phone went with Aubree by mistake. Her mom’s last pictures are on it. Her mom passed in August. Kim cries about it at night.”
“I’ll give it to the caseworker.”
His smile stayed exactly where it was.
“I’d hate to see your review go sideways over a phone,” he said. “And a notebook.”
I hadn’t said one word to him about a notebook.
Socks on the hall floor behind me. Aubree had come out of her room with the fox. She looked around my hip at him, and then she turned and went into the bathroom, and the lock clicked.
He leaned to see past me.
“Hi there, Aubree-girl. Tyler says hi.”
He set the lemon bars on my porch rail.
“Goddamn shame, all this,” he said. “Kids need their people.”
He went down the steps and backed out of my drive with his headlights across my front window. The bathroom lock stayed shut for forty minutes.
I sat on the hall floor outside it. I didn’t knock.
When she came out she said, “Is he gone?”
“He’s gone, bug.”
She went to bed in her clothes. I let her.
Then I took the phone off the charger.
I went to the pictures first. Forty-one of them. Gray tile on a kitchen wall, from every angle. A receipt. A dog I’d never seen.
I didn’t find one old woman in any of them.
Then the calendar, because it had a red dot on it.
It was a family calendar, everybody in their own color. Tyler’s dentist in blue. Kim’s bunco night in purple.
And in green, over and over.
D, lunch duty, 11:30.
I counted ten since Labor Day.
12:31
Marlene came over at eight and took Aubree. She didn’t ask me anything. She set her coffee on the porch rail next to the lemon bars and held out her hand, and Aubree took it.
I drove to the east side and parked in a visitor spot, and this time I stopped at the front desk.
A binder sat on the counter with a pen on a bead chain. VISITORS AND VOLUNTEERS, on a label-maker strip. The woman behind the desk had a nameplate that said PHYLLIS and a candy dish full of butterscotch.
“Help you?”
“I’m signing in,” I said.
I wrote my name, 8:54, and “to see the nurse” in the box for why. Then I turned the page back. And back again.
“Those aren’t for flipping through,” Phyllis said.
I kept turning. I took a picture of every page that had his name on it. Darrell Strand. Volunteer. Lunch. A time in and a time out, and a big loopy D every time.
“Darrell?” Phyllis had her hand on her desk phone. “Darrell’s a sweetheart. He brings kolaches.”
I signed myself out at 8:58 and went back to my car.
I sat at my kitchen table, opened the green notebook to the first page and laid my phone next to it.
The nurse kept times. They ran down the left side in that same tidy print.
Darrell Strand, in at 11:31. Aubree, to the nurse at 11:44.
Darrell Strand, out at 12:29. Aubree, sent to class at 12:33.
Next page. Darrell in at 11:28. Aubree to the nurse at 11:40. Darrell out at 12:31. Aubree to class at 12:35.
I did all eight with my finger. Then the ninth page.
Then the day I’d circled on my kitchen calendar, the night of the bruise. His name was on that sheet too. In at 11:30, out at 12:40.
The nurse’s book had nothing for her that day.
Marlene brought Aubree home at noon. She came and stood at my elbow and looked down at the table.
“The nurse book,” she said.
“It is.”
She put her finger on her own name. Then on 12:33.
“Bug,” I said. “Do the lunch helpers ever go in the nurse room?”
She shook her head.
“They have to wear the sticker.” She touched her shirt, up by her shoulder, where a sticker would go. “Stickers stay in the lunchroom and the hall.”
“And the nurse room?”
“The nurse room has the door.”
She said it like it was the first thing anybody learned in that building.
“When the bell goes, he has to sign out,” she said. “Then I can go back.”
I closed the notebook. She kept her hand flat on the cover.
“Gram,” she said. “Is Wednesday a lunch-duty day?”
The tissue box
The review was in a little room on the second floor of the county building, a round table with a box of tissues in the middle of it.
The caseworker had her laptop open. Gail sat next to me because I’d asked her to, and she didn’t tell anybody why she was there.
I’d called the number on the back of Weller’s card the night before. He said he’d come by at ten for copies. He was out in the hall on a plastic chair.
Darrell came alone.
“Kim’s down with one of her migraines,” he said. He shook the caseworker’s hand, and Gail’s, and then held his out to me again. I had both of mine on my purse.
He talked first, and he talked the most.
He said he wasn’t there to make trouble for anybody. He said he’d been cleared to be around a few hundred kids at that school, and he’d do the paperwork again tomorrow if anybody wanted.
He said Kim had been a saint with Aubree, an actual saint, and nobody at this table had lived with it.
He said I was sixty-two and worked nights and had walked a health record right past the assistant principal. He said he wasn’t calling me a bad woman, just a tired one.
He said his wife’s phone was in my purse and he’d like it back. He’d like his niece every other weekend. Tyler missed her.
The caseworker typed. She nodded once.
I opened my purse.
I set the green notebook on the table, open to the first page. I set the printed pictures of the sign-in sheets beside it, ten of them, in order. On the back of the tenth one I’d written a single word in pen.
I set Kim’s phone at the end with the calendar on the screen.
I didn’t say anything.
Gail leaned over and read across the dates. Then she turned the notebook around so it faced the caseworker.
Darrell looked at the phone.
“I volunteer,” he said. “Plenty of dads in that building volunteer. Are we making a federal case out of a lunch shift now?”
Gail didn’t answer him. The caseworker didn’t either. She had the tenth picture turned over in her hand.
“That calendar is my wife’s private business.” His voice was coming up. “Her phone, Brenda. A notebook you STOLE and a phone you stole and a kid who makes things up.”
He reached for the phone.
I put my hand flat on it.
He took my arm, high up, above the elbow, the way you’d take hold of a chair that was in your way. He didn’t even look at me while he did it. He squeezed until my hand came up off the table.
Gail was on her feet.
“Above the elbow,” I said.
The caseworker looked at my arm. Then she looked at the word on the back of the picture.
Darrell let go. He laughed once, through his nose.
“Come on. She grabbed for it first.”
Gail opened the door. Weller was already up off the plastic chair.
“Sir,” Weller said. “Step out here with me a minute.”
Darrell looked at the caseworker. She had her eyes on her laptop. He looked at me.
“She lies, Brenda,” he said. “Kim knew it the first week. Give it a year.”
He went out.
Gail reached across, picked up the folder with Aubree’s name on the tab from the caseworker’s side of the table, and set it down on ours. The caseworker let her.
I put the notebook and the phone back in my purse. My arm was already going red in four places.
Weller pulled the door shut behind them.
Ugly bananas
The week before Thanksgiving I picked Aubree up at her new school, twenty-two minutes across town with the lights.
The caseworker who told me to keep her where she was doesn’t have her file anymore. Gail’s office has it.
I went back to the old school once, for the things in her cubby. I signed the binder. I turned back two weeks of pages before Phyllis got a word out. His name wasn’t on any of them.
I gave the bakery my notice the week after the review. Nineteen years. They gave me a sheet cake and a gas card, and the gas card’s already gone.
My name tag is in the junk drawer, in the spot where Kim’s note used to be.
The closet door from her room is out in the garage, leaning on the mower. Her clothes hang on a rack where she can see every one of them.
The marks on my arm went green and then went away. Hers had already gone.
Jenna had called the Sunday before. Aubree talked to her for six minutes about a class hamster.
When we got home from that pickup, I unzipped her lunch bag at the counter, and there was a sticky note across the zipper in her printing, pressed so hard the pencil went through in one spot.
I ATE THE CRUSTS.
She had. I put the note on the refrigerator next to Weller’s card.
Then we went to the Hy-Vee. A different one, on the other side of town.
She rode in the cart even though her knees hit the handle. She grabbed my sleeve in produce.
“Gram. Gram, not those.”
“Which ones, bug?”
She leaned out over the handle and put both hands on the brown bunch.
“The ugly ones,” she said. “The ugly ones are the sweet ones.”
Send this one to somebody raising a grandkid the second time around. They’ll know the kind of quiet I mean.
For more stories about family secrets and unexpected turns, check out I Gave His Mother the Gray Suit to Bury Him In, or perhaps My Father Read Grandma’s First Page Out Loud And Pocketed The Rest, and don’t miss My Brother Knelt In The Aisle And Wanted The Envelope Back.
