Jake walked back into the conference room and looked around. “Is this everyone?”

I’d checked the sign-up document online right before we’d left. There had been six families signed up. A total of eighteen kids. With Brenda’s five and my four, we were only at nine.

I sighed.“Apparently so.”

“Okay,” he said. He hesitated, and I knew he wanted to ask questions. But the kids had all stopped talking and were watching us with eagle eyes, wondering what was going on. Jake cleared his throat. “We’ll get started in just a few. And just to warn you ahead of time. We have another group coming today, too. A bigger group.” He leaned into my ear. “A public school group.”

I made a face. “That’s fine.”

“Well, you usually talk about school groups like they carry the bubonic plague,” he said, grinning. “Just wanted to prepare you for the invasion.”

As homeschoolers, we were spoiled. We never waited in lines at amusement parks or museums or zoos because we went during the day, when most kids were in school. Anytime we saw the yellow buses roll up, I’d cringe a little. Not because I disliked public school kids—Jake and I both went to brick and mortar schools and we had one kid currently enrolled—but because it usually signaled the arrival of a crowd we weren’t ready for and lines we hadn’t anticipated.

“We’ll handle the invasion just fine,” I said. “No turf wars or anything. I promise.”

He winked at me. “Excellent. Give me a minute and I’ll be back and we’ll get started.” He trotted off down the hall.

I settled into the seat next to Brenda and, in a low voice, filled her in on what had happened. The 4-H meeting. The sign-ups at co-op. The crazy sister and ex-wife. She sat and listened, even while Derek, her two-year old, attached himself to her pant leg and Drew, her five year old, babbled loudly about Mario Brothers. She didn’t judge and didn’t offer advice; she just listened. And it was exactly what I needed.

Jake finally came back with another employee at the plant. It was someone I didn’t recognize, an older, grizzled man wearing a flannel shirt, jeans and worn work boots. He greeted us with a grim smile and he and Jake went through the basics of the place—how it worked, where the trash came from, what they did with the materials they collected and recycled. He played a short video that showed everything he’d just explained in action. When the video ended, Jake and Gus, the other employee, herded us into the hallway and distributed hard hats to everyone. After some persuading, Brenda convinced Gus that a hard hat would not, in fact, fit on Mary’s head and that she would do her best to shield the baby with her body instead.

“It doesn’t smell as bad as it usually does,” Will said as we walked.

“That’s because it’s winter and it’s not as hot, so the garbage isn’t ripe,” I said.

“Ripe? Like a piece of fruit?” Grace yelled, trying to be heard above the whir of the machines.

“Something like that,” I called back.

Will wrinkled his nose. “You mean gross.”

“Right. Gross.”

“Good,” Will said. He shoved his hands in his pockets and made a face. “Normally, I want to vomit when we go out there in the big recycling room.”

“Well, let’s hope for no vomiting today,” I said.

“I hope for that every day.”

I rolled my eyes.

Jake took us through a series of doors that led to a massive storage building where the garbage was dumped. It was roughly the size of an airplane hangar. Trucks drove in through a large door, dumped their haulers into a massive pile of trash and then drove out another door. There were mountains and mountains of trash. Bulldozers then dug into the mounds, lifting trash and moving it onto the conveyor belts, where men in little booths used mechanical arms to sort through it as it rode past them. Whatever they chose to remove from the belts was then put in another bin for the next level of sorting. It was all incredibly efficient and made my heart flutter to actually witness something that was truly helping to make the planet a better place.

It was what Jake called my “hippie vibe.”

Whatever it was, it was in full force as we walked into the storage building.

Jake spoke to the kids about what they collected and where it all went after it was sorted and the kids were starting to ask questions about the weird things they found when the next school group was brought into the observation room.

The group was roughly five times the size of ours and the kids looked like they were Grace’s age, either 2nd or 3rd graders. They crowded toward us, squealing with excitement, awed both by the size of the room and the mountains of trash. One kid started to wander off from the group toward one of the trash piles, but was quickly herded back to the group by one of the adults with the group, a woman who looked oddly familiar. Long brown hair. Thick-heeled shoes that looked more appropriate for a fashion show than a field trip.

Helen Stunderson.

She wore a thick black sweater and a crème colored corduroy skirt over black tights. Big silver earrings jangled from her ears as she rushed the boy back to the pack, her face contorted in anger as she chastised him.

I stared at her. Olaf hadn’t mentioned that they had a child. Why was she there? Was she stalking me again? That didn’t seem plausible, given that she was with the group from the school.

She took a deep breath, adjusted one of her earrings and did a double take when she saw me. She froze for a moment and her cheeks bloomed pink. Then she blinked, lifted her chin and looked back at the employee who was leading their group.

Seeing her completely unnerved me. I was already confused about her lying to me at the library and because Olga had given me a completely different story than what Helen had. Now she was showing up on the same field trip as me?

Jake had said it himself. Too many coincidences.

Helen glanced my way again, then quickly looked back to their guide. She did that two more times before Jake ushered our group up the stairs and into one of the picker booths.

The kids packed themselves next to one of windows and watched the conveyor belt as the guy at the booth controls used the long metal arms to sort, move and pick through the trash riding up the belt. They giggled and pointed. I glanced out the window.

Helen’s group was no longer in sight.

I tried to focus on why we were there to begin with.

Grace stuck her finger on the window. “I see a doll! Can we get the doll, Mommy?”

“Probably not.”

“Awwww.” Grace’s face fell. “I don’t want her to die in the trash.”

“There’s another one!” Sophie yelled. “They are probably sister dolls!”

Jake made his way around the crowd of kids to me. “Are you alright?”

I looked at him. “Of course.”

“You look…I don’t know. Kind of weirded out.”

“Just all these dead dolls,” I said, motioning to the conveyor belt.

He eyed me dubiously.

“I’m fine,” I said, touching his elbow. “Really.”

He raised an eyebrow like he wasn’t buying the explanation. He never bought my fake explanations, which was really annoying. He knew me too well and could see right through me when I was trying to avoid telling him something. There was something really wonderful about being that connected to another human being but sometimes I hated not being able to hide anything from him.

He moved away from me and announced to the kids that we were going to go back downstairs and take a closer look in the bins that the picking machine was dropping things into. Our small group of kids cheered and moved for the door to the stairs. I held the door, making sure they all got out and that we didn’t leave Derek behind to drive the controls of the picking robot. Because, at two years old, it was absolutely something he would do. The guy at the controls waved at me as I said goodbye.