We have never had all of our children in the same school at the same time. Halfway through elementary school, Katie transferred to another school that hosted a gifted program and Josh was in preschool while Anna went to the elementary school at the end of the subdivision.

            Before that, Anna was in preschool while Kaitlin was in her first three years of elementary. To this day, there is still always someone who needs to be shuffled off somewhere. I don’t know how Pam keeps it all straight. I never could.

             Luckily, we have always had neighbors with kids going to the same schools as ours, so like every other suburban neighborhood in America, we take turns carpooling.

            On any weekday morning, one can watch a whole choreographed parade of minivans stopping on their routes to pick up children in the neighborhood and lining up in front of the school to drop them off like a large army of ants in GM red, green, silver and navy blue, working for the good of the colony.

            On rare occasions, I filled in for Pam. At 8 am, I had to deliver Katie to the elementary school and take Anna up to the preschool about three miles from our house. On the way, I was supposed to pick up neighbor girl. I don’t remember a lot about the neighbor girl, except that she was one of about a hundred little kids that were constantly playing around the neighborhood. In our area kids outnumber adults about two to one and it seems like there is a new one showing up every week. They’re like miniature transients at a soup kitchen. They show up now and then, eat my food and leave. I see them on the street, tell them to get out of the road while I’m backing out of the driveway and then I don’t see them again until we have a fresh supply of fruit snacks.  That’s pretty much all I know about any of the neighbor kids.

            So I picked up the neighbor girl.

            The neighbor girl’s mother was standing in the window when I pulled up, but I honked anyway, because that’s what you do when you pick up kids in suburban America. I may have been new to this carpooling thing, but I knew that much. A minute later, a backpack with legs is backing out the door as her mother bends down to kiss the neighbor girl’s head, somewhere behind the pack that was obviously purchased with the intent that she will grow into it in a few years.

            The neighbor girl turned and timidly walks to the car, and climbs in the back seat, where Anna dominated the conversation until we got to the elementary school.

            At Meadow Elementary, I drop off Kaitlin and the neighbor girl and head out to drop off my final package at Mary’s Little Lambs preschool. On the way, I’m thinking how nice it is that my work schedule is flexible enough for me to do this now and then. How many other fathers would love to have the opportunity to have this little interaction with their children like I get to?

            At the time, I was working nights a couple times a week, so I got to attend field trips (bowling was my favorite) Dads ‘n Donuts reading days and preschool graduations that, had I been working another schedule, I might have missed. I still try to get to what I can, but it’s much harder now. On a regular daytime schedule, I have to make time for things, I was home, so I could just go.

            As I walk into the preschool, Anna announces to the teacher that the neighbor girl is going to Katie’s school today. And as the teacher asks her why, it takes a second for it to sink in.

            “I don’t know,” Anna said “My dad just dropped her off at Kaite’s school.”

            And then it hits me. The neighbor girl is in preschool!

I quickly tried to explain to the preschool teacher that I had just left the neighbor’s four-year-old at the wrong school, and all the while she looked at me with her head tilted that said “you’re kidding, right?”

I could see there was no use trying to save face on this, so I just got back into the minivan and rushed back to the school as fast as I could.

As I pulled up into the elementary school parking lot, the neighbor girl was sitting on the curb, sobbing as the teacher assigned to parking duty that morning tried to figure out who the kid was. There was no chance of that happening. What little information the neighbor girl did share was so punctuated with sobs and sniffs that it was unintelligible.

I explained to the teacher on the curb what had happened and got that look again. On my way to the elementary school I had convinced myself that this probably happens all the time and surely the people at the elementary school would understand. Now I was beginning to realize that was just wishful thinking. And this wasn’t the worst of it. I still had to talk to the neighbor girl’s mother.

As I pulled into the neighbor girl’s driveway, her mother was standing in the window and I was beginning to suspect that she stood there from the minute her child left the house until she returned again. She came out with a half -puzzled look when she saw her daughter emerge from the car three hours before she expected her home.

 I tried to re-tell the story as lightly as I could in a last ditch effort to convince her that this was no big deal and that surely people drop off four-year-olds at the school on accident all the time. She didn’t buy it. She cut the conversation short, wrapped her arms around her daughter in a protective pose and walked the neighbor girl, still sniffing and sobbing reflexively, into the house.

After school, I asked Katie why she didn’t tell me that the neighbor girl was in preschool. She said she did, but I cut her off and told her that she was responsible to make sure the girl made it into the school. So that’s what Katie did. She took the neighbor girl by the hand, walked her up to the first teacher she could find and said “My dad said I was supposed to bring her to school.”

The teacher, thinking that the girl was probably one of the new kindergarten children, took the neighbor girl and walked her to where the kindergarten teachers were lining up all their children after assuring Katie that she would take care of everything. By the time they all realized that the child wasn’t in any of the kindergarten classes, nobody could remember who had delivered the neighbor girl to them in the first place. The teacher decided to take the neighbor girl out to the parking lot again in the hopes that her parent would realize her carpool was one child short and return looking for her, which is where I finally met up with them.

The neighbor girl’s mother started driving her own child to school after that and I never talked to her directly again. I tried to joke about it a few days later with the neighbor girl’s father, believing that as a man, he would understand how this happened. He didn’t. I had to resign myself to the fact that they were never really going to trust me with their kid again.

The awkwardness ended when the neighbors moved a few months later. To my knowledge, the move and the carpooling incident were not related.

At least that’s what I tell myself.