Then my daughter said, “Paige. Do you still have the yellow form?”
Paige said, “What form.”
And Nadine reached into that canvas bag she hauls everywhere — the one with the crayons and the wipes and the spare everything — and took out a photocopy, folded in three, soft at the folds.
Early intervention referral. Wood County. Dated the fourteenth of March, three years ago. Child’s name, Bennett. Referred by, and then my daughter’s name and her license number, the one that took her four years of night classes and a student loan she’s still paying on.
Bennett was twenty-two months old and he had eleven words. Paige thought he was shy. Everybody thought he was shy. He’d sit under the table at parties with his hands over his ears and everybody said, oh, he’s just a quiet one.
Nadine had him one Saturday while Paige and my son went to a wedding, and she got down on the floor behind him and clapped once, hard, and he didn’t turn around. She did it again. Nothing.
She filled that form out that night at my kitchen table.
Fluid behind both eardrums for God knows how long. He’d been hearing the whole world through a pillow since before he could walk. They put tubes in him in June, and by Christmas that baby would not stop talking, and he has not stopped since, and he was under that Easter table right then telling a four-year-old cousin the entire plot of a movie.
Paige knew about the tubes. She did not know how they got there. She’d always thought their pediatrician caught it at a well visit.
Nadine turned the page toward her and pointed at the bottom box, the one they make you fill in by hand, reason for referral. It’s the only part of that form in her handwriting:
“He does not startle. He watches mouths instead of eyes. His mother is doing everything right and she cannot hear what I hear because she has never stood in a room with twenty of them. Please do not make her wait.”
Please do not make her wait. Nadine wrote that about the woman who had just called her a nose-wiper in front of the whole family.
Paige read it and put her hand over her mouth and then she got up so fast her chair went over backward. She went down the hall to the bathroom and stayed in there a long while, and my son went and stood outside the door, and the rest of us sat in the wreckage of an Easter ham and did not know where to look.
She came back out with her face washed. She didn’t make a speech. She said, “Nadine, I have been unkind to you for sixteen years,” and Nadine said, “Yes,” because my daughter does not lie to spare anybody, and then she said, “Sit down, honey, your eggs are getting cold.”
The toddler was still fussing across the room. Paige went and got him herself.
She’s gotten him herself every time since. And when somebody at a party said something last summer about Nadine “just working with the little ones,” Paige turned around on them so fast the whole yard went quiet.
Sixteen years I let that ride at my own table. My daughter spent those same sixteen years listening to a room the rest of us weren’t even in.