I’d win this ten-year war. Until my sentence was up, I’d be living my best life ever.

Take that, Victor.

* * *

I was in the middle of ironing a stack of Perler bead boards for a bunch of eager five-year-olds when an electronic chime let me know that someone had just entered the Young Souls daycare center.

“It’s a dad!” Aniyah informed me in sign language from her position on the other side of the ironing board. She wasn’t deaf, but, like many of my Young Souls kids, she liked to use the “secret hand language,” even outside of our ASL lessons. “I don’t know who.”

I didn’t bother to look over my shoulder to try to confirm the guy’s identity.

Aniyah was our public announcement system disguised as a five-year-old. The kind of kid who liked to be the first to tell the other children when their parent was here, and it was time for them to go home. So if she didn’t know who this dad was, that meant that we’d need to check his ID.

Whoever it was, he was a little early. I’d just gotten started on fusing together the bead projects the kids had made on pattern boards. And from experience, I knew there was no way a kid would let their parent leave before they’d collected their cooled-off art project. Not without a mini-meltdown, at least. Hopefully this guy wasn’t in a rush.

“Ms. Marge, can you get that?” I called out to the other daycare assistant on duty.

“Got it, baby,” she answered back from somewhere behind me.

“Yay! Time to play Guess the Dad!” Aniyah said out loud to the rest of the group.

I laughed. This was a game the kids liked to play. Most of the time, moms handled pickup. But sometimes, dads we’d never seen before came in, and we’d had to ask them to present ID and make sure their name was on the approved pickup list.

So Aniyah and the other kids liked to play “guess the dad” whenever a male parent walked in that they didn’t recognize.

I set the iron down to sign and say, “Maybe he’s nobody’s dad. Maybe he just wants a brochure.”

I always spoke and signed to the kids when my hands were free. It was my way of immersing them in the language outside of formal lessons.

“No, he is Lara’s dad,” another kid named Benny signed, looking over the ironing board at the new arrival. Then he said out loud, “It’s gotta be.”

“Why do you say that?” I asked with signs. I scanned the pile of pegboards and pulled out the pegboard with Lara’s name written out in sharpie on top of a piece of masking tape.