My husband’s mother was the only family let into St. Agnes the night we lost our daughter, and the week after the cremation she patted my knee on my own couch and said, “Maybe God knew you weren’t built for it, Tara.” Six years later her other son adopted a six-year-old, and his wife pulled me into the laundry room and asked what time mine was born.
Eliza had been theirs for nineteen days.
Corey and Alicia spent eleven years on needles, two rounds of IVF and a second mortgage before they quit and called the county.
And it was Phyllis who found her.
“A lady from my old church fosters,” she said at Easter, passing the rolls down the table. “There’s a little one over there who needs a real home.”
Phyllis worked thirty-one years as a charge nurse on the maternity floor.
She retired the summer after I lost mine.
I’d seen Eliza four times since the papers went through.
She called me Aunt Tara and made me paint her nails every visit, a different color on each finger, and she blew on them so hard her whole face went red.
Every one of those visits, I drove home with the radio off.
She was six.
Mine would have been six in March.
I went into labor at thirty-one weeks, the second week everything locked down.
Mitch drove me to the ER doors and a guard in a paper mask put a hand on his chest.
“Patients and staff only,” the guard said.
Phyllis was staff.
She was in the room in her blue scrubs when they put me under for the C-section, and she was the one holding my hand when I came up out of it.
“She didn’t make it, honey,” Phyllis said. “It was her lungs.”
I asked to see her.
“You don’t want that picture in your head,” she said. “Let me handle it.”
She signed the cremation forms while I was still on the morphine.
The name I’d picked was still written on the whiteboard across from my bed when they wheeled me out.
Two weeks later I got a plastic box in a velvet bag, and Phyllis sat on the arm of my couch and said what she said.
Mitch and I stopped trying after that.
He told everyone it was for my sake.
So when Alicia grabbed my wrist at Sunday dinner at Phyllis’s house, I thought she needed help with the gravy.
She steered me down the hall into the laundry room and shut the door with her hip.
The dryer was running. A jar of loose buttons buzzed on the shelf above it.
She was holding a blue county folder flat to her ribs with both arms.
“What time was she born?” Alicia said.
“Who?”
“Yours. What time, Tara.”
“Why are you asking me that?”
“Please just tell me.”
“Three-fourteen in the morning,” I said.
Alicia shut her eyes.
“We asked for her medical history,” she said. “For allergies. The county had to pull it from St. Agnes.”
She opened the folder on top of the dryer.
A birth record. March 11, 2020. 3:14 a.m. Female, thirty-one weeks, four pounds two ounces.
Mother: blank.
Under that somebody had typed RELEASED TO COUNTY CUSTODY, and after it, CONDITION STABLE.
Stable.
“That’s a coincidence,” I said. “It’s a huge place.”
“That’s what Corey said.”
“Women have babies there every HOUR, Alicia.”
“At three-fourteen? At thirty-one weeks? The same night they told you yours was gone?”
I had no answer for that.
She turned to the last page.
There was a release line at the bottom, the kind a nurse signs when a newborn leaves the floor.
The signature leaned hard to the right, the way it leans on every birthday card I’ve gotten for twenty years.
P. Upchurch, RN.
My hands went cold against the dryer.
“Has Corey seen this?” I said.
“He says his mom signed a thousand of these.”
“Has Mitch?”
“Nobody but you.”
Through the door I could hear Phyllis laughing at something, the big laugh she saves for company.
“She picked Eliza out for us,” Alicia said. “Out of the whole county. She drove us to the first visit herself.”
I took the folder out of her hands.
I walked back up the hall and into the dining room.
Phyllis was at the head of the table with the serving spoon, dishing potatoes.
Eliza was right beside her on two cushions, her nails still pink from last week.
Mitch looked up. Corey stopped chewing.
“Sit down, Tara,” Phyllis said, smiling with all her teeth. “You’re letting everything get cold.”
I set the folder next to her plate, open to the last page.
“YOU SIGNED HER OUT,” I said. “SHE WAS BREATHING AND YOU SIGNED HER OUT.”
Nobody at that table moved.
Phyllis looked down at the page.
Then she looked at Eliza.
And she kept right on smiling.
“Eat up, sweetheart,” she said, and put another spoonful of potatoes on Eliza’s plate.
The serving spoon
Eliza picked up her fork and ate.
Phyllis set the spoon back in the bowl and laid her hand flat on the open folder. Her rings clicked on the page.
“She’s home, Tara,” she said. “She’s sitting at her grandmother’s table with her family. That’s all anybody ever wanted for her.”
She didn’t say it wasn’t true.
She didn’t say it was a mix-up, or a thousand babies, or a huge place.
She said home.
I reached for the folder and she didn’t lift her hand. She just pressed down a little harder, the way you hold a sheet on a bed while somebody tucks the corner.
“Not now,” she said. “We don’t do this over supper.”
Alicia was in the doorway with her hand over her mouth.
Corey had a piece of roll in his fingers and he set it down on the tablecloth, not on his plate.
“Mom,” he said. “What is she talking about?”
“Your sister-in-law is upset,” Phyllis said. “It’s a hard time of year for her.”
It was November.
Eliza looked up at me with potato on her chin. “Aunt Tara, your face is all wet.”
“No, baby,” I said.
It was. I hadn’t known it until she said it.
I slid the folder out from under Phyllis’s hand. The paper tore a little at the corner where her ring caught it.
I held it against my chest the way Alicia had.
Phyllis picked up her fork.
“Mitch,” she said. “I think Tara needs to go home and lie down.”
And Mitch stood up.
That was the part I kept going back to later, lying in the dark. He stood up the second she said his name.
He came around and put his hand on my back and steered me toward the hall.
He didn’t ask what was in the folder.
He didn’t ask what time.
I held the page to my chest all the way to the car. He never once looked at it.
The shelf above Mitch’s boots
The box was still in our bedroom closet, top shelf, left side.
My daughter’s ashes. Six years behind a shoebox of tax papers, above the boots Mitch wears twice a winter to shovel.
I’d taken it down maybe three times. Once to move. Once on what would have been her first birthday.
Once when I was cleaning and forgot it was there, and it came down into my hands before I knew what I was holding.
The velvet was navy blue, the kind they put cheap jewelry in at the mall. The drawstring had a plastic bead on each end.
The box inside was black plastic with a white sticker on the bottom. A case number and a name, ELLISON CREMATION SERVICES, and nothing else.
It weighed about as much as a deck of cards.
I never opened it. Mitch said I shouldn’t. He said it the same way his mother did, nearly word for word, the first week we were home.
“You don’t need to see that, Tare. Let it be.”
So I let it be.
Mitch did everything else that spring. He did the calls. He did the mail.
When the envelopes came from St. Agnes and from the insurance, he took them from the box at the curb before I could get to them. He spread them on the kitchen table with his reading glasses on and paid what had to be paid.
“It’s just the bill,” he said, the one time I asked. “I’ve got it.”
He set up the bill pay that April, too. Our account, his login. The electric, the mortgage, the car.
And three hundred dollars a month to his mother.
“For her pills,” he said. “Dad’s insurance quit when he died, and you know she won’t ask Corey. Corey’s got nothing left.”
That was true. Corey and Alicia were into the needles by then, and the first round of IVF was already on a credit card.
I said of course. She’d held my hand. She’d handled it.
What I remember about that first year is mostly the couch.
I lay on it. People brought food and Mitch put it in the freezer and some of it is probably still in there.
Phyllis came on Tuesdays and Thursdays and sat on the arm of it and talked about the floor, who was pregnant, who’d retired, which doctor was a drunk.
The week after the box came, she patted my knee and said what she said about God and how I was built.
I didn’t say anything back. I was on the couch with a heating pad on my incision.
Mitch was in the kitchen. He heard her. He didn’t come in.
There’s one other thing from that spring, and it’s small, and I would never have thought about it again.
That night at St. Agnes, after they put me under, I kept texting Mitch from the recovery bay. My phone was on the tray.
I texted at 5:52 and 6:10 and 6:31, just his name over and over, because I was coming out of it and nobody would tell me anything yet.
He didn’t answer until 7:10.
“Phone died on me,” he said when I asked, weeks later. “I was sitting in the garage nine hours with no charger. Worst night of my life.”
I believed him. Why wouldn’t I.
I believed all of it until I was sitting in the passenger seat outside his mother’s house with a blue county folder on my lap.
Mitch got in. He didn’t start the car.
“Did you show anybody else that?” he said.
Mitch’s side of the bed
“Show anybody else what?” I said.
He started the car.
“I’m asking you a question,” I said. “What do you think is in here?”
“Whatever Alicia got off the county,” he said. “Tara, she’s been through hell. Eleven years. She’s looking for something wrong.
“That’s what people do when they finally get the thing they wanted. They wait for it to get taken.”
“It says three-fourteen.”
“Okay.”
“It says thirty-one weeks. Four pounds two ounces. Mitch, they told me four pounds.”
“Okay.”
“Your mother signed it.”
He put the blinker on. There was nobody on the road.
He idled at the stop sign with the blinker going so long that the car behind us honked, and then he turned.
“Mom signed every baby that left that floor for thirty years,” he said. “That’s her job. That was her job.”
“She was never on the floor that night. She was in my room.”
“She was staff.”
“She was in my room, holding my hand, when she signed this.”
He didn’t answer. He drove the rest of the way with both hands on the wheel, ten and two, like he was taking a test.
At home I didn’t put the folder down. I went to the bathroom with it. I went to the kitchen with it.
I set it on the nightstand on my side and lay down in my clothes on top of the blanket.
Mitch brushed his teeth forever.
When he came to bed he said, “Do you want me to call her?”
“Call her and say what?”
“Ask her what this is. Let her explain it. She’ll have an explanation.”
“She already explained it,” I said. “She said home.”
He turned off the lamp.
I slept, somehow. I woke up at 2:40 because the house was too quiet and his side of the bed was flat.
The folder was gone from the nightstand.
I went down the hall. The light over the stove was on, nothing else.
He was on his knees on the kitchen floor with my purse open by his knees.
My wallet, my keys, my sunglasses, the gum, a receipt from the pharmacy, all of it laid out on the tile in a row.
The folder wasn’t in there. I’d moved it to the trunk of my car before I came to bed, under the spare, while he was in the bathroom.
Why I’d done that only came clear right then.
He looked up at me. He had my lipstick in his hand.
“I was looking for the Tylenol,” he said.
The portal at St. Agnes
Monday I called in to work. Tuesday too.
Mitch went to work like it was any Monday. He kissed me on the side of the head on his way out.
He said, “We’ll talk tonight, okay? We’ll figure out what this is.”
We didn’t talk that night. He came home at ten and said he’d been at his mother’s.
What I did Monday was sit at the kitchen table with my laptop and try to remember the password to the St. Agnes patient portal.
They’d signed me up for it in the hospital. A nurse did it on her phone while I was still too out of it to hold mine.
I’d gotten an email afterward that I never opened. It was still in my inbox, six years down, under a coupon for diapers I’d signed up for in my second trimester.
I reset the password three times before it took.
There were my visits. The ultrasounds. The glucose test I failed and then passed. The admission at 1:58 a.m. on March 11, 2020.
And then the delivery record.
My record. With my name at the top and my date of birth.
I read it the way you read a menu in a language you only half know. Most of it was codes.
Blood loss. Anesthesia. The time they made the cut and the time they closed.
Under that there was a section called INFANT.
Live female. 3:14. Apgar 6 and 8.
Apgar meant nothing to me, so I looked it up, sitting there in the kitchen with my hand over my mouth. It’s the score they give a baby at one minute and at five minutes.
Eight out of ten.
Under that it said transferred to the NICU at 3:20, on a breathing tube, and the tube came out at 4:45.
She breathed on her own at 4:45.
At 4:45 I was in recovery and Phyllis was holding my hand.
I scrolled down. There was one more line under the infant section, typed in all capitals like the county record. The time on it was 6:10 a.m., March 12.
Twenty-seven hours after she was born.
INFANT SURRENDERED BY PARENT UNDER SAFE HAVEN PROVISIONS. NO IDENTIFYING INFORMATION RETAINED. RELEASED TO COUNTY. P. UPCHURCH RN.
Surrendered by parent.
Aaliyah Vanderlinden
I called Alicia from the car. I was sitting in my own driveway with the engine off because the house felt like his now.
She picked up on the first ring. I could hear Eliza in the background singing something about a bus.
“Hold on,” Alicia said. A door closed. “Okay.”
I read it to her. All of it, the Apgar, the tube, the 6:10, the last line.
She went so quiet I checked the call hadn’t dropped.
“Safe haven,” she said. “I know about safe haven. When you wait as long as we waited, you read everything. You read about every way a baby ends up with the county.”
“What is it?”
“It’s a law. A parent can bring a newborn to an ER and hand it over, no questions. No names. Nobody gets in trouble. It’s so they don’t leave them in dumpsters.”
“A parent.”
“A parent has to hand them over, Tara. That’s the whole point. It’s the parent’s choice. A nurse can’t just do it.”
“I was under.”
“I know you were under.”
“So who handed her over?”
Alicia didn’t say anything. Eliza was knocking on the door on her end and saying Mommy, Mommy.
Alicia said, “One second, baby,” in a voice I’d never heard her use before, a whole other voice.
“Her name was Sandra Dizon,” Alicia said. “The foster mom. From Phyllis’s old church. She had Eliza from the time she was a baby.
“Six years, in the same house. She cried at the handover and Phyllis hugged her in the driveway until she stopped.”
“Phyllis knew her.”
“Phyllis knew everybody.”
After Alicia hung up I called the number on the county folder.
It was a caseworker. Aaliyah Vanderlinden. She’d done Corey and Alicia’s home study and their placement.
She sounded young and tired and like she had forty other folders on her desk.
I told her who I was. I told her what the portal said. I told her I was the mother.
She stopped typing.
“Mrs. Upchurch, I have to be careful about what I say to you,” she said. “A safe haven surrender is anonymous by law. There’s no birth mother of record. That’s what the blank means.”
“I’m the birth mother of record. It’s in my own chart.”
“I understand what you’re telling me.”
“So what do I do?”
“If you want to make a claim, that’s a court matter. You’d need a lawyer. And I have to tell you, if a claim comes in on a placement that hasn’t finalized, the placement goes under review.”
“What does under review mean?”
“It means the finalization gets postponed. It means the child’s case gets reopened. Depending on what the court finds, it can mean a lot of things.”
“Could they take her out of that house?”
She went quiet.
“I can’t promise you they wouldn’t,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’m going to have to make a note that you called.”
I said don’t. I said please don’t, I’m just asking questions.
She said she had to.
Corey called me two hours later. I’d never heard him like that.
Corey is the soft one. He’s the one who cries at the end of movies and pretends it’s allergies.
“The county called us,” he said. “The county called us at dinner, Tara. They said there’s a review. They said the hearing in December might move. Do you know what that word does to Alicia? Review?”
“Corey, I’m sorry. I never thought they’d call you.”
“What did you think they’d do?”
“I just wanted to know.”
“You want her? Is that it? Is that what this is?” He was walking around. I could hear his feet on their stairs.
“Because if you push this, nobody gets her. You understand? Not you, not us. She goes back in the system and some judge gets to decide in a year and a half.”
“That’s not what I want.”
“Then what do you want?”
I didn’t have an answer.
“Mom told me what you were like,” he said. “After. She said you didn’t get off the couch for a year. She said you weren’t well, Tara. She said you were never really well, even before.”
Payee: S. Dizon
Tuesday night Mitch said he was going to his mother’s again.
“She’s beside herself,” he said. “She’s seventy-three. She’s not sleeping.”
I said okay.
When his car turned the corner I opened the laptop on the kitchen table and went to the bank.
We have one account. We’ve had one account for nineteen years.
I have the login, I’ve always had it, I just never used it for anything but checking a balance before I bought groceries. Mitch did the bills. He liked doing them.
I opened bill pay.
Electric. Mortgage. The water. The car. His truck. The trash.
And a payee I didn’t know.
S. DIZON.
Three hundred dollars, the fifteenth of every month. I clicked it and it opened the history.
The history went back so far I clicked “show more” eleven times.
The first payment was April 15, 2020.
The memo line on every one of them said the same thing. One letter.
E.
Every March there was a second payment. Two hundred more, on the eleventh. The memo on those said BDAY.
I scrolled to the top. The last payment was October 15. There was nothing scheduled for November.
The payee had been edited nineteen days ago, the day the papers went through, and the note at the top of the screen said RECURRING PAYMENT CANCELLED BY USER.
I sat there and did the math, because doing the math was something to do with my hands.
Seventy-nine months. Six birthdays.
Twenty-five thousand, seven hundred dollars.
Her pills.
I heard the car in the driveway at 9:30. Early for him.
The door from the garage opened and he came in with his keys still in his hand, and he saw me in the kitchen chair, and he saw the screen.
He stood there.
“She’s been paying for that out of her own money for years,” he said. “Mom. For church. I was just covering it.”
I turned the laptop around so it faced him.
“The memo says E,” I said.
He set his keys on the counter. He pulled out the chair across from me and sat down in it, slow, the way he sits after he’s been on a ladder all day.
“Tara.”
“You told me your phone died.”
He looked down at his hands.
“You didn’t answer me from 5:52 until 7:10,” I said. “She was breathing on her own at 4:45. They put the surrender in at 6:10.”
“You don’t know what it was like.”
“Tell me.”
He rubbed his face with both hands.
“Mom came down to the garage,” he said. “Around five. She knocked on the window. She said the baby was alive but there was a bleed. In her head. She said the scans were bad.
“She said she’d seen a hundred of them and they never walk, they never talk, they’re in a chair their whole lives and the mothers fall apart. She said you’d fall apart. She said, ‘You know how she is, Mitch. You know she’s not built for it.'”
“She said that to you first.”
“She said if we took her home I’d lose you both. And she said there was a way where nobody had to know. Where you’d grieve, and you’d get through it, and you’d never have to see it.”
“There was no bleed,” I said. “She’s six. She does cartwheels on their lawn.”
“I didn’t know that then.”
“You knew it when you were writing checks.”
He didn’t say anything to that.
“How did you get in,” I said. “The guard put his hand on your chest.”
“Mom took me in the staff door. The stairwell by the loading dock. She had her badge.” He was talking to the table now.
“She brought her down the stairs in a little blanket and handed her to me on the landing. And she walked me down one floor to the door by the ambulance bay. There’s a drawer in the wall there. It’s warm inside. There’s a button.”
“And you put her in the drawer.”
“Mom said it had to be me. It has to be a parent. She said, ‘It has to be you, honey, or it doesn’t count.'”
He started to cry. Mitch doesn’t cry. I’d seen it once, at his father’s grave, and he’d turned around so nobody could see.
“I pushed the button,” he said. “And I went back out to the car and I sat there, and then my phone was going and going with your name.”
I got up from the table.
I went down the hall to the bedroom and opened the closet and reached up over his boots for the velvet bag.
It weighed what it always weighed.
He was in the bedroom doorway behind me. “Where are you going?”
I took my car keys off the dresser and walked past him and out the front door.
The head of the table
Corey’s truck was in Phyllis’s driveway. So was Alicia’s car.
Later I learned Phyllis had called them over that night to talk about “what to do about Tara.” Eliza was home with Alicia’s sister.
Phyllis answered the door in her robe. She looked at the velvet bag in my hand.
She stepped back and let me in without a word, the way you’d let in the gas man.
They were at the dining table. Same table, same cloth. Somebody had wiped up the gravy.
Mitch’s car pulled in behind mine before I got my coat off.
I set the velvet bag down at the head of the table, at Phyllis’s place. Then the printout from the portal. Then the printout from the bank, the whole long history, seventy-nine lines of E.
Phyllis sat down. She put on her reading glasses from the pocket of her robe and read the bank page first. She read all of it.
Mitch came in and stood by the china cabinet.
“Well,” Phyllis said. She took off the glasses. “He told you.”
“Mom,” Corey said.
“No, I’m glad. I’m glad it’s out. I’ve carried this six years by myself and I’m seventy-three years old and I’m tired.” She folded the glasses and set them on the bank page.
“You want to know what I did? I’ll tell you what I did. I did what I did forty times on that floor. Forty times in thirty-one years, a girl who couldn’t do it, a girl who had no business with a baby, and I walked her down to that drawer and I made it easy.
“Nobody’s name on anything. Nobody in trouble. The baby gets a family that wants her. That’s what it’s for.”
“I wanted her,” I said.
“You wanted the idea of her.” She said it kindly. That was the worst part.
“Tara, I knew you for fourteen years before that night. You cried in my kitchen at seven months because the crib had a recall. You called me at two in the morning because the heartbeat sounded fast on that little home machine.
“You had a baby four pounds two ounces with a tube down her throat, and Mitch’s job was going under that spring, and every hospital in the state was locked shut. I’ve seen it. I’ve seen what happens to women like you when it goes wrong.”
“There was no bleed,” Alicia said.
Phyllis didn’t look at her.
“There was going to be something,” she said. “There always is, with the early ones. And I wasn’t going to let my son lose his wife over it.”
“So you took his daughter,” Corey said.
“I didn’t take anything. I put her with Sandra. I’ve known Sandra Dizon forty years, she’s fostered sixty kids, she’s the best there is. I saw that baby every month of her life. I held her at her first birthday. I bought her shoes.”
She turned to Corey and her face changed, it went soft and proud.
“And when you and Alicia couldn’t, after everything you went through, after the needles and the house, I brought her home. To you. To this family. She’s an Upchurch, Corey. She was always going to end up at this table. I just got her here the long way.”
“What’s in the box,” I said.
Phyllis looked at the velvet bag like it was a dish someone had left out.
“Ash from the fireplace,” she said. “Out of the grate in the den. Ellison owed me a favor and gave me a box and a sticker.
“What was I supposed to give you, nothing? You needed ashes to put on a shelf.”
Nobody said anything.
Then Corey picked up the bank page.
He read it the way she had. All the way down. When he got to the bottom he looked across the room at his brother.
“You knew,” he said. “Every time. Every round. Every time Alicia lost one, you stood in my kitchen and hugged me, and you were paying for her.”
“Cor,” Mitch said.
“Eleven years. You let me put a second mortgage on my house while you had her on bill pay.”
“I couldn’t tell you. It would have come out.”
“It came out.”
Corey stood up. He took his keys out of his pocket and worked one off the ring, a brass one with a strip of red nail polish on the head so he could find it in the dark.
Eliza had painted it. I’d seen her do it.
He put the key down on top of the velvet bag.
“That’s your house key back,” he said to his mother. “You don’t come to ours. You don’t pick her up from school. You don’t see her.”
“Corey. Honey. Sit down.”
“You don’t see her, Mom.”
Phyllis turned to me then. She stared straight at me, and the smile was gone. It was the only time all night.
“This is what you wanted,” she said. “You came in here to take her. Go ahead. Go tell your lawyer.
“She’ll be back with the county by Christmas, in some house with strangers, and you’ll have done it. Not me. You.”
I took out my phone. I had Aaliyah Vanderlinden’s number from Monday, the direct line she’d given me before she hung up. It was 10:40 at night. It went to her voicemail.
I put it on speaker and laid the phone down next to the box.
“This is Tara Upchurch,” I said. “I called Monday about the Upchurch placement. I’m not making a claim. I want that on the record. I don’t want her moved, and I want the hearing in December to go ahead the way it was set.”
Alicia put both hands over her face.
“I’m also going to send you two documents tomorrow,” I said. “My delivery chart from St. Agnes and a bank history. The nurse who signed the surrender is Phyllis Upchurch, RN. She’s sitting across from me.
“I want to report her to whoever you report a nurse to. The surrender wasn’t made by a parent who chose it. The parent was told a lie in a parking garage at five in the morning.”
I hung up.
Phyllis’s mouth was open.
“You’d do that to me,” she said. “After I held your hand.”
I picked up my phone and the printouts. I left the box where it was, under Corey’s key.
At the door Mitch said my name. He said it twice.
Phyllis said, “Mitch. Say something to her. She’s your wife.”
March 11
The hearing went ahead the second week of December. I wasn’t there.
Alicia texted me a picture from the courthouse steps: Eliza in a red coat, Corey holding her up so she could see over the railing.
Phyllis’s license was suspended in January while the state looked at forty files. The letter came to my new address because I was the one who’d filed.
I read it standing at the mailbox and then I put it in a drawer.
Mitch lives in the house. I live in a one-bedroom with a balcony that faces a car wash.
He signed what my lawyer sent without changing a line. He still texts sometimes on Sunday nights. I don’t answer.
On March 11 Alicia dropped Eliza off at noon.
“Seven,” Eliza said at my door, holding up seven fingers. “I’m seven.”
“I know you are.”
She’d brought her own polish. A whole bag of it, ten bottles in a navy velvet bag with a plastic bead on each end of the drawstring.
I’d given it to Alicia in December and told her to give it to Eliza for whatever she wanted. That’s what she wanted.
We sat on my couch. She lined the bottles up on the cushion between us by color, and then changed her mind, and lined them up again.
I painted her nails. Pink, orange, purple, a green that was almost black, gold.
She blew on them until her whole face went red.
Then she climbed up and sat on the arm of the couch above me, careful of her wet hands, and patted my knee with the side of her wrist.
“Now you, Aunt Tara,” she said, and held out her hand for the brush.
If this one stayed with you, send it to somebody who still has a box on a shelf they’ve never opened.
For another story about the things left unsaid in a marriage, read “My Husband Asked What Dad’s Tape Said About Him. I Hadn’t Told Him Anything.”. You can also find family memories, loss, and love in “My Dead Daughter’s Letter Told Me to Hold My Husband’s Sleeve” and “Dad Packed Thirty-One Letters for His Birthday. Every One Was Addressed to Mom.”.
