Chapter 7
Harper
I pull into the New Chapter parking lot at seven forty-eight, travel mug in one hand and my clipboard in the other.
The morning air still has that cool edge to it, and I pause for just a second outside the side entrance to the children’s wing and breathe it in.
This is the part I love best. Before the drop-offs, before the noise, before any of it.
Just the quiet knowledge that in about an hour this hallway is going to be full of kids who have no idea how to be anything other than exactly what they are, and I get to be here for that.
I push through the door.
The hallway smells like carpet cleaner and the lingering scent of goldfish crackers, which is honestly the most comforting smell I know.
Micah is already at the check-in station when I round the corner into the main preschool area.
He is bent over the tablet at the check-in desk, scrolling through something, his glasses falling down his nose, and he pushes them back up with his pointer finger.
He has his church lanyard on, and his hair is doing that thing where it looks like he ran his hand through it in the car and then forgot about it.
Not that I am looking.
I just need to verify that he has arranged the check-in tablet, which fully justifies looking in his direction for legitimate operational reasons.
He looks up when I walk in. “Morning.”
“Morning.” I set my clipboard down on the nearest table and start counting the crayon bins. “Tablet working?”
“Already updated the check-in list.” He holds it up briefly, then sets it back down. “You’re twelve minutes earlier than last week.”
“I have a lot of crayons to count.”
He gives me a look that is both patient and faintly amused, which is something he does constantly, and I used to despise, but now…now I have mixed feelings about it. Then he goes back to his tablet, and I go back to my crayons.
By eight forty-five, the drop-off rush has hit its stride, and the children’s wing is exactly as loud as it is supposed to be.
I am stationed in the preschool room, crouched at table height while seventeen three-year-olds watch me with the intensity that only tiny people and large dogs are capable of.
“Okay,” I spread my hands out on the table. “Who knows what rain is?”
Every hand goes up. Three kids also stand up. One child named Beau, who has been wearing the same fire truck shirt every Sunday since September, raises both hands.
“It comes from the sky,” he says with enormous authority.
“It does. It comes from the clouds.” I make a loose, falling-fingers motion with both hands, and they mimic me, which is the other thing I love about this age group.
They just do what you do. No self-consciousness, no second-guessing.
“And a long, long time ago, the Bible tells us it rained for a really, really long time. Like, way more rain than we’ve ever seen. ”
“How long?” a girl named Clara asks. She has two braids and a very serious expression.
“Forty days and forty nights.” I say.
I walk them through it the same way I walk kindergartners through their reading groups with total conviction that this is the most important information they will receive today.
Noah was warned. Noah listened. Noah built something enormous even though it probably seemed strange to the neighbors.
I asked them to name animals that might have been on the Ark.
We get dogs, cats, elephants, and one impassioned pitch for a dinosaur from a boy named Miles.
We talk about what it means to trust in God, even when you can’t see the complete picture.
I am good at this. I know I am good at this, not arrogantly, but in the same matter-of-fact way I know I am good at parallel parking and making pie crust from scratch. Some things you just know because you have put in the hours.
I grew up in the church. I know these stories the same way I know the alphabet or my multiplication tables.
Noah, Moses, Jonah, Ruth. The Sermon on the Mount.
The Great Commission. I have heard them all so many times that they have settled into something comfortable and familiar, like a sweater I have owned for years.
Which means I do not need to sit in service and hear them again.
I am better used here, in this room, watching these kids absorb something real and good and true for the very first time. Which is arguably more important than sitting in a padded chair and taking notes.
I pass out the animal stickers for the craft and feel completely settled in this conclusion.
Somewhere between the craft and the song, I become aware that Micah has appeared in the doorway.
He does this periodically, doing his walking rounds, checking in on each room to make sure everything is running smoothly.
I have watched him do it enough times that I know his pattern: he appears in the doorway, scans the room, makes a note on his clipboard if anything needs addressing, and moves on.
He is not intrusive about it. He is just quiet and thorough.
He stops in the doorway of my room for approximately five seconds.
I am leading the kids through the closing song, which involves hand motions, so I do not stop. But I am aware of him standing there in my peripheral vision, arms loosely crossed, watching the room run exactly the way a room is supposed to run.
He makes another note on his clipboard.
Then he moves on.
I file this away as operationally irrelevant and go back to the hand motions.
What I do not file away, unfortunately, is the moment right before he moves on when the light from the hallway catches his profile and I think, in a way that is mostly involuntary, that Ivy was right. He is good-looking.
Not in a way I had ever thought to pay attention to before.
I am resetting the tables for second service when Jade, another volunteer, starts gathering her bag from the back corner. She is newer, probably in her mid-twenties, a genuinely warm person who always remembers your name and brings enough snacks to share. I like her.
“Okay, I’m heading out,” she says, zipping up her bag. “You coming, Harper? I heard this week is a fantastic message. Something about time management, how we fill our hours.” She tilts her head. “Or are you serving both hours again?”
I smile. “Oh, no, actually. I’m going to lunch.”
“Oh, fun!” she brightens. “Well, be sure to watch the stream online later.”
“Oh, yeah.” The words are out before I have finished the thought. “Of course. I always do.”
She squeezes my arm on her way past. “Have fun at lunch!”
She disappears into the hallway.
I pick up a stray crayon from the floor and set it back in its bin.
The truth is I have watched approximately one service stream in the last four months, and that was only because it was playing on Ivy’s laptop when I walked into her apartment.
I tell myself I am going to watch the stream every single Sunday, and then I get home and there is laundry and a book I am three chapters into and a very insistent need to make something for dinner that takes longer than it should, and by Tuesday the idea has passed.
But it would have made Jade feel bad to say that.
I straighten the final crayon bin and tell myself the guilt sitting just beneath my sternum is just hunger.
The hallway is buzzing with people. Families, regulars, people stopping to talk to people who are stopping to talk to other people.
The lobby area outside the children’s wing becomes a slow-moving river of Sunday clothes and stroller traffic, and I am weaving through it toward the side exit when I nearly walk directly into Micah.
He catches himself first, stepping slightly to the right, which means I narrowly avoid full impact but still end up closer to him than intended because someone with a double stroller has just merged into the space behind me and there is nowhere to go.
“Hey,” he says.
“Hi.” I shift sideways to let a family pass on my left. “Ready?”
“Yeah.” He glances over my head at the crowd. “I guess I’ll meet you there?”
“Yep.” I move toward the exit. “I’ll probably beat you there.”
“That is an interesting thing to be competitive about.”
“I’m not competitive. I’m just stating a likely outcome.”
“Those are the same thing.”
Someone cuts between us going in the opposite direction, which briefly separates us by about four people. I resurface on the other side and find him still standing roughly where I left him, looking unbothered by the foot traffic.
“Okay,” I say, because I am closer to the door and there is a clear path opening up. “Whoever gets there first chooses the appetizer.”
He raises his eyebrows, solemn acknowledgment. “Try not to get too far ahead of me.”
“No promises.”