My husband missed all fourteen hours of our daughter’s birth, and when he finally leaned over her bassinet he didn’t touch her. He backed into the wall and said, “What the hell did you do, Paola? Who told you about my mother?” His mother had been dead nine years. That’s what he swore to me the week we got engaged.
We’d spent six years, two rounds of IVF and $31,000 of my grandmother’s house money getting Gemma into that plastic bassinet.
We lost one before her, at eleven weeks.
We never told his side about that, because Jonah said he didn’t have a side.
That was the story from our second date on.
His dad left when he was four. His mom, Henrietta, raised him by herself in a trailer outside Sioux City and died of a stroke the year before I met him.
No brothers. No sisters.
No pictures either, because the pictures were in a storage unit he’d stopped paying on.
I felt sorry for him, and I built our whole life around that. Thanksgiving at my mom’s. My cousins treating him like a brother. My dad teaching him to smoke a brisket in the backyard every Fourth.
Labor started on a Tuesday while he was on a three-day haul.
He kept texting that he’d make it.
He didn’t.
My mom held one of my legs and a nurse in lime-green Crocs held the other.
Gemma came out at 4:52 in the morning, furious and loud, with a full head of black hair.
Black, except for one stripe.
Right above her forehead there was a streak of pure white, about as wide as my thumb.
The nurse called it a skunk stripe and said sometimes they fill in. I thought it was the prettiest thing I’d ever seen.
My cousin Breanna had her picture up on Facebook by six. By seven it had forty-something hearts.
Jonah got there a little after eleven, still in his work boots, carrying a pink foil balloon from a gas station and a stuffed bear with the price tag hanging off one ear.
He was crying before he reached the bed.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, babe. I drove ten hours straight.”
He kissed my forehead, then my hand, then my forehead again.
His phone kept buzzing in his hoodie pocket. He never checked it.
“Can I see her?”
“Go look,” I said. “Take her hat off. Wait till you see her hair.”
He bent over the bassinet and peeled the little striped cap back with two fingers.
And stopped.
The balloon string slid out of his other hand. The balloon floated up, bumped a ceiling tile, and stayed there.
He didn’t look at it. He didn’t look at anything but her.
“Jonah?”
He put the hat back on her, fast, tugging it almost down over her eyes.
Then he backed up until his shoulders hit the wall next to the sink.
“What the hell did you do, Paola?”
“What did I DO? I had a baby. You missed it.”
“Who told you about my mother?”
I laughed. I was full of stitches and whatever was in the IV, and I actually laughed at him.
“Your mother’s dead, Jonah. You told me she was dead.”
He didn’t answer that.
He kept staring at the bassinet like something in it could hear him.
“Did somebody from back home call you? Did somebody show up here?”
“Nobody called me. I spent all night pushing a person out of my body. What is WRONG with you?”
He slid down the wall until he was sitting on the floor in his boots.
“She had it,” he said. “Right there. Same spot.”
“Had what?”
“The stripe. My mom had it. Her mom had it. It skips around.”
I looked at the bassinet. Then at him.
“So she’s got your mom’s hair. That’s sweet, Jonah. That’s not a crime.”
“You don’t get it.”
“Then MAKE me get it.”
He covered his face with both hands and stayed like that long enough for the blood pressure cuff on my arm to squeeze and let go by itself.
“She’s not dead,” he said into his hands.
Everything in me went very quiet.
“Say that again.”
“My mother’s alive. She’s sixty-three. She lives about forty minutes from your parents.”
“FORTY MINUTES FROM MY PARENTS?”
“I had a reason.”
“For nine years? Through our WEDDING? Through the one we lost?”
“I had a reason, Paola. And it isn’t only her.”
“What does that mean, not only her?”
He took his hands off his face. He looked gray under the stubble.
“When I left, I didn’t just leave my mom.”
“Who else did you leave?”
He opened his mouth.
And the door opened.
A woman stood there with a gift bag in one hand and her phone in the other.
Forty, maybe. Dark hair pulled back tight.
And right above her forehead, a white streak as wide as my thumb.
She turned her phone so I could see the screen. Breanna’s post. Gemma’s picture.
She wasn’t looking at me, though.
She was looking at my husband, sitting on the floor in his work boots.
“Karina,” he said.
I had never heard that name in my life.
She set the gift bag down by the door, very carefully, like it might break.
“Does she know about us yet?”
And Jonah looked at our daughter instead of at either one of us.
The wall by the sink
Nobody answered her, so she answered herself.
“I’m his sister,” she said. “Karina. I’m the older one. Three years.”
I reached over the bed rail and pulled the bassinet toward me by its plastic lip. It rolled about a foot and bumped the bed. I don’t know what I thought I was protecting her from. A woman with the same hair as her.
“He doesn’t have a sister,” I said.
“Okay,” Karina said.
She didn’t argue. She just looked at Jonah on the floor, the way you look at a dog that got out and came back on its own.
“You weren’t supposed to come here,” he said.
“You weren’t supposed to have a baby with Mom’s hair.”
“That’s not something I picked.”
“No,” she said. “It never is.”
Jonah wiped his face with the heel of his hand. Then he looked up at me, and he said the thing that made sense of his first line, the one that was still ringing in that room.
“You said wait till you see her hair. You said it like you knew.”
“I said it because it’s PRETTY, Jonah.”
Karina took one step in from the door. Only one. She kept her phone in her hand with Breanna’s post still on it, Gemma’s red face filling the screen.
“Mom saw this at seven this morning,” she said. “She hasn’t let go of the tablet since.”
Epps
I need to tell you how much I felt sorry for him, because it’s the part I’m most ashamed of now.
The first Thanksgiving he came to my mom’s, he stood in the kitchen doorway holding a store pie like it was a tip he wasn’t sure he was allowed to leave. My dad handed him a beer and a carving knife and told him the turkey was his job from now on. Jonah carved it so carefully my aunt took a picture.
He cried in the truck afterward. He said nobody had ever handed him the knife before.
Every year after that he carved. Every Fourth he stood at the smoker with my dad. My dad wrote the brisket rub on an index card for him, and Jonah kept that card in his wallet behind his CDL.
He never had his phone out at my parents’ house. Face down on the counter, every time. I used to think it was manners.
And I did the money. I always did. He drove, I paid the bills, and I kept a spreadsheet with a tab for every month going back to the week we opened the joint account.
There was one line I never had to think about.
$400 on the first of the month to K EPPS.
He told me about it before we got married, so it wouldn’t look weird. An old driver named Epps had sold him a rebuilt transmission on a handshake, back when Jonah was broke, and Jonah was paying him back a little at a time. Interest-free. Because Epps had been good to him when nobody else was.
I thought that was the sweetest thing about him. A man who pays an old trucker back for nine years on a handshake.
When we did the IVF, I moved money around for months. Grandma’s house money in, clinic payments out. I cut our streaming, I cut his gas station breakfasts. I never once touched the Epps line. You don’t stiff a man who was good to you.
That’s what I was thinking about, lying in that bed with my stitches pulling, while a woman with my daughter’s stripe stood by the door.
Not the trailer. Not the storage unit with the pictures.
The transmission.
“She can’t come up here, anyway,” Jonah said to the floor. “She can’t do the stairs.”
Seven-oh-four
The stairs.
He said it like you say a fact about weather. Like he’d known it for a long time.
“How do you know what stairs she can do?” I said.
He didn’t answer. His phone buzzed again in his hoodie pocket, and this time it slid out when he shifted his legs and landed face up on the floor tile next to his boot.
I could read it from the bed. That’s how big they make the letters now.
K: Mom saw her. Same as Mom. Same as me.
Under it, older ones, stacked.
K: Jonah answer me.
K: She keeps saying your name.
K, 7:04: If you don’t call me back by ten I’m coming up there.
He flipped it over. Too late.
That was when my mom walked in with two coffees and a bag of muffins from the cafeteria, the same sweatshirt she’d held my leg in, and stopped in the doorway next to Karina.
She looked at Karina’s hair. Then at the bassinet. Then at Jonah on the floor.
“Who’s this?” she said.
“His sister,” I said.
“He doesn’t have a sister.”
“Apparently he does, Mom.”
And my mother, God love her, did what she has done my whole life, which is decide that the most tired person in the room is the one who needs protecting. She set the coffees down on the tray table next to the stuffed bear.
“Paola, honey. He just drove ten hours. Whatever this is, let the man breathe before you start.”
“I didn’t start anything.”
“I’m just saying. Let him breathe.”
Karina looked at my mom for a long second. Then she said, very evenly, “He breathes fine. He’s been breathing fine for nine years.”
Jonah got up off the floor then. He went over to my mom like she was the one who’d understand. Like she was his.
“Mavis, this is family stuff from back home. It’s complicated. I’ll handle it.”
My mom has let him call her Mavis since the first Thanksgiving. Nobody else her age calls her that. Even my dad calls her Mave.
“Of course, honey,” she said. And she patted his arm.
Karina picked up her gift bag from the floor by the door, like she was about to leave.
Instead she said, “She didn’t die, you know. She had the stroke. And then she just kept living.”
Breanna’s page
My mom sat down in the vinyl chair by the window. She didn’t take her coffee.
Karina stayed by the door and told it the way you tell something you’ve told a lot of offices.
Henrietta had the stroke at fifty-four, in the trailer, on a Sunday. Karina found her. The left side went and never really came back. She could talk, slow. She couldn’t dress herself or get up three steps. She couldn’t be left alone.
“So I quit the plant,” Karina said. “And Jonah went on a haul.”
“I had a job,” Jonah said.
“You had a job for eleven days. Then you had a new phone number.”
She moved Henrietta into a place after the trailer got too hard. One floor, no stairs. Room 114. Forty minutes from my parents, the way he’d said.
Then she said the part that made my mom put her hand flat on her own chest.
“I know your dad’s brisket,” she said to me. “I know you had a yellow dress at the rehearsal dinner. I know your mom’s kitchen has the rooster on the wallpaper.”
My mom’s kitchen does have the rooster.
“How?” I said.
“Your cousin posts everything. Breanna. Her page is public.” Karina lifted her phone a little. “Mom found Jonah in the background of a Fourth of July picture six years ago. Standing at a smoker. She made me look. I’ve checked Breanna’s page every Sunday since. Mom calls it her show.”
Every Fourth. Every Thanksgiving. My aunt’s picture of him carving the turkey.
His mother had been sitting in Room 114, forty minutes away, watching him eat at my mother’s table on a tablet.
“That’s sick,” my mom said, quietly. I couldn’t tell which one of them she meant.
“It’s what we had,” Karina said.
I asked her the only thing I could get out. “Why didn’t you just come? Any of those years. Why didn’t you just knock on the door?”
Karina looked at Jonah.
Jonah looked at the bassinet.
“Because we had a deal,” she said. “Ask him what he does on the first of the month.”
K EPPS 400.00
My phone was on the tray table, under the stuffed bear’s leg. I pulled it out and opened the bank app with my thumb, the way I do it every first of the month, without looking.
Scheduled transfers. Then history.
K EPPS 400.00.
K EPPS 400.00.
K EPPS 400.00.
I scrolled until the joint account ran out. Then I opened the spreadsheet, the one with a tab for every month, and there it was again in my own typing, in the row I’d colored green because it was the one line I never had to worry about.
“What’s your last name?” I said.
“Epps,” Karina said. “My husband’s name. Twelve years.”
I turned my screen around and held it up to her, the way she’d held hers up to me at the door. Gemma’s picture on hers. Her own name on mine.
She came closer to read it. Close enough that I could see the white went all the way to the root on her, same as on Gemma.
“First of the month,” she said. “That covers the part of Mom’s room the state doesn’t.”
“He told me it was a transmission.”
Karina laughed once, through her nose. Not at me.
“Did he tell you what the other half of the deal was?”
She opened her messages and handed me her phone. She didn’t hand it to Jonah. She handed it to me.
It was a thread that went back further than my screen would scroll. Every month, the same thing from his side.
Sent.
Sent. Same deal.
Sent. Don’t come out here.
And one from the summer we lost the baby. I remember the week because I was still bleeding.
Sent. If you or her ever show up I stop. I mean it.
“Her” was his mother.
I gave the phone back. My hands were shaking enough that she had to take it from me twice.
Six years of me cutting his gas station breakfasts. Six years of my money going to the mother he cried about in my dad’s truck. Paying her to stay dead.
My mom stood up out of the vinyl chair.
Jonah put his hands out like he was stopping traffic.
“Don’t you look at me like that,” he said. “I PAID for her. Every month. Ask her if I missed one.”
The tray table
He talked for a long time after that. Longer than he talked at our wedding.
“I was twenty-eight. You don’t know what it was. She couldn’t feed herself, Paola. Karina was wiping her. I was wiping her. In a trailer with the heat out. I got on a haul to Omaha and I just didn’t turn around, okay? I didn’t plan it. I just didn’t turn around.”
Nobody said anything.
“And then I met you. And your dad hands me a knife at Thanksgiving like I’m somebody. You think he hands me that knife if he knows where I came from? If he knows I left her in a chair?”
“He would’ve,” my mom said.
“You don’t KNOW that, Mavis.”
“I set you a plate nine years,” she said. “I know that.”
He turned back to me. He had the voice he uses on dispatchers.
“I kept it separate. That’s all I did. I kept it separate and I paid for it, and it was working, and it would’ve kept working if she’d just stayed on her side like she promised.”
He pointed at Karina without looking at her.
“You knew the deal. You knew what happens if you come out here.”
“Mom asked me to,” Karina said.
“Mom doesn’t decide. I decide. That’s what the four hundred is.” He finally looked at her. “You just cost her that. You understand? That’s done. You did that, not me.”
Karina didn’t flinch at it. She’d heard him say it before, in writing. But my mom made a sound like she’d been stepped on.
He was going to cut off his own mother’s room, with his daughter four feet away wearing his mother’s hair, to win an argument with his sister.
Gemma started crying then. Not loud. The little goat noise she makes, even now, when she’s working up to it.
Jonah took a step toward the bassinet.
“Don’t,” I said.
He stopped.
I picked my phone up off the blanket. I have an account in my name only. My grandmother put her house money in it before she died, and after the clinic there was just under nine thousand left. It was supposed to be my maternity leave. Twelve unpaid weeks.
I opened the scheduled transfers. I set up a new one. From that account. K EPPS. $400. The first of every month. No end date.
I turned the screen to Karina so she could read it.
“It still goes out on the first,” I said.
Karina read it twice. She didn’t say thank you. She put her hand over her mouth and nodded.
Jonah read it over her shoulder.
“That’s our money,” he said.
“It’s my grandma’s,” I said.
“Paola. Come on. That’s my mother. You don’t get to just—”
“Go home, Jonah.”
My mom picked the stuffed bear up off the tray table and held it out to him. The price tag swung off its ear.
He looked at the bear. He looked at me. He looked at the bassinet one more time, at the striped cap he’d pulled down over her eyes.
Then he took the bear, and he walked out past his sister in his work boots, and the door shut on its slow arm behind him.
The balloon stayed up on the ceiling tile. Nobody could reach it.
Room 114
Five Sundays later my mom drove us out there, forty minutes exactly, with Gemma’s car seat buckled in the back next to me.
Karina met us in the lobby. She’d told the front desk we were coming, and they had our names on a sticky note.
Henrietta was in a wheelchair by the window with a tablet on her lap. Breanna’s page was open on it. A picture of Gemma from the week before, asleep on my dad’s chest in his recliner.
Her hair was white all the way through now, so the stripe didn’t show on her anymore. Karina said it used to be the only white thing on her.
I set the car seat down on the bed so it was at the height of her good hand.
She leaned over it slowly. It took a while. Karina stood behind her and didn’t help unless she was asked.
Henrietta took the edge of the little striped cap between two fingers and peeled it back.
Gemma’s stripe hasn’t filled in. I don’t think it’s going to.
Henrietta looked at it a long time. Then she put her thumb on it, right on it, the way you’d press down a stamp.
“Same spot,” she said.
If this one got to you, send it to somebody whose family is on somebody else’s Facebook page.
Family loyalties can turn unexpectedly sharp – see what happened when a sister-in-law made a promise she didn’t mean in “I Had a Threaded Needle in My Purse”. For more stories about family taking sides, read “My Mother Read The First Page” and “My Dad Let My Ex-Father-In-Law Sleep On His Couch”.
