“Or we can just ask Aunt Renee, she’s already on the pickup list.”

I don’t think the secretary even noticed the way I went quiet. She was already flipping through some binder on her desk, just moving on to the next thing.

I stood at that counter and I remember gripping my purse strap because I needed something to hold onto while I tried to figure out what she had just said to me. Aunt Renee. I turned the name over in my head like maybe I’d misheard it. Maybe she meant someone else’s file. Maybe she had the wrong grandmother standing in front of her.

I have raised Marcus since he was three years old. His mama passed, and my son Darnell was not in a place back then where he could do it alone, so Marcus came to live with me. I have been to every single parent-teacher conference, every school play, every doctor’s appointment where they need to know about allergies and medications. I know his teacher’s first name. I know which lunch he likes on Fridays. I know that he still sleeps with the little stuffed dog we got him at the zoo when he was four, even though he’d be embarrassed if I said that out loud. I am not a visitor in this child’s life. I am his person. And this woman was standing there telling me about an aunt like I just forgot one existed.

I asked her to say the name again. She looked up and I guess something in my face told her this was not a normal question, because she got a little careful. She said, “Renee. She’s listed as an emergency contact. Family, aunt.” I told her very calmly that Marcus does not have an aunt.

I don’t have a daughter. Darnell doesn’t have a sister. I said I needed to see the emergency contact form. The one from this school year.

She hesitated. I don’t blame her now, but in that moment I wanted to reach over the counter and find it myself. She made a phone call, and then she made me wait in one of those little chairs by the office window for about fifteen minutes, which felt much longer. I kept looking at the hallway where kids walk through between classes and I kept thinking about Marcus in one of those classrooms not knowing I was sitting there.

When the assistant principal came out she brought the form. I looked at it and there was my name at the top, my phone number, my address, exactly how I always fill it out. But this form, the one for this school year, I had not filled out. Darnell fills it out on his years. We alternate because that’s what the custody arrangement says, and honestly I never thought much about it. I trusted him to put down the right information. He’s Marcus’s father. Why would I check behind him on something like a school form.