My husband left the groceries for me at 34 weeks pregnant and said, “You’re just lazy.” His mother heard him, filled his backpack with flour, and offered him a test. By breakfast, she was blocking our nursery, and the question she made me ask had nothing to do with groceries.
I’d been saving my breaks at the checkout so I could sit instead of spending them walking to the bathroom.
At home, asking for help had started taking more effort than doing things myself.
That Sunday, Griffin carried the bags through the entrance and stopped there.
The milk needed refrigerating.
I asked him to lift the heavier bags onto the counter so I could sort them without bending.
He reached past me for a packet of crackers.
“You’re just lazy.”
Patrice stood behind him with the shopping bag she’d brought from her house.
She’d offered to bake while we finished getting things ready.
I kept expecting Griffin to laugh properly, to make it something we could pretend I’d misunderstood.
He chewed instead.
“Breanna, you’ve been home since noon.”
I’d put away the crib instructions that morning after finishing the assembly he’d started the previous weekend.
The last screw had taken several tries because I couldn’t see the screw hole past the crib rail.
He’d inspected it afterward.
He’d even shaken the rail.
Now he nodded toward the groceries as if they’d explain his point for him.
“She can stand around talking at work, Mom.”
Patrice lowered her bag.
“How much of her shift have you been there for?”
“I hear about it.”
“You hear about her feet.”
He rolled the cracker packet shut with a care I wanted him to use on anything that belonged to me.
I reached for the milk.
Patrice took it before I could lift it, then held it out toward her son.
He accepted it with a grin.
“There. Emergency over.”
I hated that grin.
It usually meant I was supposed to stop talking.
Our house in Rockford had become somewhere I rehearsed requests before making them.
Could you carry this sounded wrong.
Would you mind sounded worse.
Patrice asked where he kept the backpack he used for work.
“Why?”
“Bring it here.”
He fetched it from the hook, still eating.
She emptied his gloves onto the counter and checked the seams.
Then she lifted a bag of flour from her shopping.
“You said carrying extra weight couldn’t make her THAT tired.”
“Because it doesn’t.”
“Want to try some?”
He held his arms out.
She used our flour too, until the backpack held 12 pounds, then passed it over.
He slipped the straps on backward himself, with the bag against his front.
“This your scientific experiment?”
“It’s flour, Griffin.”
The zipper pull had a plastic fish he’d won at a bowling alley; he tucked it underneath so it wouldn’t poke him.
I nearly laughed at that.
He made adjustments for discomfort before he’d taken a step.
Patrice pointed toward the groceries.
“Start where she stopped.”
He lifted the bags easily and gave me a look over his shoulder.
“Still alive.”
But reaching the bottom cupboard meant turning sideways, and the backpack kept meeting the cupboard handle.
He moved the groceries onto the counter.
“That’s where I asked you to put them,” I said.
He stopped smiling at me.
Patrice handed Griffin the cloth I’d left beside the sink.
The cupboard fronts needed wiping where a grocery bag had leaked.
He crouched, stood, then tried bending from farther away.
“Can I take this OFF for a minute?”
“Of course,” she said.
Griffin grabbed the backpack strap.
“But give her the same answer when she asks to stop.”
His hand stayed there.
I pulled out a chair because my legs had started shaking from standing through an argument about whether standing hurt.
He glanced at me.
“You’re enjoying this.”
I sat before answering.
“I wanted the milk put away.”
Patrice moved the chair beside mine and sat too.
He scrubbed harder than the cupboard needed.
Then he asked where the clean cloths were.
Then which shelf the flour belonged on.
Every answer came from me.
“See?” he said. “I don’t KNOW where you want everything.”
“Then ask without calling me lazy.”
He dropped the cloth into the sink.
“I work too.”
Patrice’s mouth pressed shut.
“So does she.”
He pulled the backpack off.
The whole thing had lasted less than an hour.
“There,” he said. “Done. Can we stop making me the bad guy?”
I gripped the chair seat.
“YOU CALLED ME LAZY.”
He looked toward the window.
“Over some shopping.”
“While I was asking you for help.”
Patrice stood and took the flour out of his bag.
He let her.
That bothered me almost as much as everything he’d said.
She stayed for supper, although Griffin said we didn’t need a babysitter.
Later, I heard him talking to her while I brushed my teeth.
“You always take her side now.”
Her answer came through the bathroom wall.
“Finish telling me what you agreed to.”
The tap was running.
I turned it off, but his reply had already ended.
When I got into nightclothes, Griffin was still downstairs.
His pillow stayed untouched until I fell asleep.
At breakfast, a scraping sound came from the nursery.
I followed it barefoot.
Patrice stood across the entrance with her shoulders against the frame.
Behind her, Griffin held the little bag of spare crib fittings.
I couldn’t see the rail.
I stepped sideways.
The corner where we’d assembled the crib was EMPTY.
Its mattress stood against the wall.
“Where’s the crib?”
Griffin closed his fist around the fittings.
“We need to talk before you get upset.”
Patrice moved aside.
“Ask him where it went.”
I looked at him, but he kept looking at his mother.
“Mom. Please.”
She pointed at the bare patch of carpet.
“Tell her what you promised them.”
Kirk’s truck
Griffin didn’t answer me. He looked at the window.
So I went to it.
Kirk’s pickup sat in our driveway with the engine running. The end of our crib stuck out over the tailgate under a bungee cord, the headboard with the little cut-out moon, the one I’d rubbed smooth with my thumb because the factory edge snagged everything.
Kirk is married to Griffin’s sister. He was standing in the truck bed in his work boots, cinching the cord like he was tying down a canoe.
“Kirk’s got it,” Griffin said. “It’s in his truck.”
“I can see it’s in his truck.”
“Then why’d you ask?”
Patrice made a sound I’d only heard from her once, at a Bears game.
“All of it,” she said. “Not the piece you like.”
Griffin put the fittings bag in his pocket. He talked to the carpet.
“Tiara’s landlord sold the building. Their lease is up Friday. I said they could have this room till March.”
“This room.”
“It’s just sitting here, Bree.”
I looked at the four little dents in the carpet where the crib’s feet had been. That crib had stood there for exactly six days. It was the only part of the whole pregnancy that had felt finished.
“The baby needs this room.”
“Not for months. Bassinet goes in with us. Everybody does that at first.” He said it like a man who’d read a book. He hadn’t read the instructions for the thing he’d just given away.
“You said yes before you asked me.”
“I said yes because you’d say no.”
Patrice was still in the doorway, though she’d moved over. “And?”
“And nothing, Mom. That’s it.”
“That’s not it.”
He gave her the grin. It didn’t work on her either. That cheered me up a little, the way it cheers you up when the self-checkout yells at somebody else.
Out in the driveway, Kirk tapped the horn twice, friendly, a man with somewhere to be.
Griffin waved at him through the glass.
“They move in Saturday,” he said.
The pencil marks
The frame Patrice had been leaning on had my name on it.
B, 6. B, 9, with a smiley face, because I’d complained that the line looked sad. B, 13, so far above the one before that Grandma Hattie had pretended she needed a stepladder for me.
This was Hattie’s house. I’d slept in this room every summer from first grade until I got a job at sixteen and started sleeping in it all year. She left the house to me four years ago. The deed had one name on it, and it was mine.
I had never said that sentence out loud in front of Griffin. I didn’t want to be that kind of wife.
He’d never had any trouble being that kind of husband.
Three years ago this August, the day he moved in, he carried his bowling trophies into the den before he carried a single box of plates. Eleven trophies. His league buddies came to help with the couch, and Griffin stood in the den doorway with a beer and said, “Welcome to my house, boys.” They laughed. I laughed. He’d carried the couch up the porch steps by himself, and I decided a man who carries the couch is allowed one dumb sentence.
I’ve been letting him carry the couch ever since.
In April, when the baby boxes started coming, I asked if they could live in the den for a while.
“The den’s the one room in this house that’s mine,” he said.
So the boxes lived in the hallway, and I walked around them for two months in the dark like they were relatives.
Tiara threw my baby shower in this house. She brought the bassinet herself, wrapped in yellow paper, and cried when I cried. I liked Tiara. I’d liked her for years. She’d once driven forty minutes in sleet to bring me a phone charger.
And in October, Griffin had looked up over his phone on the couch and said, “Guys are doing a Reno thing in December. Big tournament.”
I’d looked at him. Then at my stomach, which was hard to miss by then.
“Told them no,” he said. “Obviously.” And he kissed the top of my head, and I gave him points for it. I was giving him points for anything back then. I was running a tab like a bar on a slow night.
Now I put my hand flat over B, 13.
“You could have asked me.”
“You’d have said no.”
“Yes,” I said.
He spread his hands like that settled it and walked past his mother with my crib screws in his pocket.
Slippers in November
It was thirty-eight degrees. I went out in my slippers anyway.
Kirk climbed down off the tailgate when he saw me coming. He’s a big, polite man who calls everybody ma’am when he’s nervous, including Griffin.
“Morning, Bree.”
“Put it back, Kirk.”
He looked at the headboard. Then at the porch, where Griffin stood in his socks holding a coffee like a man watching a ball game from a good seat.
“Griff said you were good with it,” Kirk said. “He said you read the bassinet’s better the first few months anyway.”
“I read the crib instructions. Twice. Because I put it together.”
“Babe,” Griffin called. “It’s freezing. Come inside.”
My feet were wet already. Slippers are a lie we tell ourselves.
I didn’t look at the porch. I looked at Kirk, because Kirk was the one holding my crib.
“This is my house,” I said. “Grandma Hattie left it to me. Nobody moves into it unless I say so.”
Kirk’s face went careful.
Griffin laughed. He actually laughed, from the porch, loud enough for the neighbors’ dog.
“Here we go,” he said to Kirk. “Grandma Hattie’s house. Every single time.”
It had never been every single time. It had been zero times. But he said it like a punchline he’d been saving for years, and it landed like one, because Kirk looked down at his boots like he was embarrassed for me.
I wanted to say, I have never once said that before this minute. I wanted to say, ask him who pays the property tax. I said nothing, because a contraction that wasn’t a real contraction grabbed my belly like a fist in a mitten, and I had to put one hand on the truck.
“Bree,” Kirk said, quieter. “We already gave notice. Tiara packed the whole kitchen last night. I got nowhere to put a crib except our storage cage, and I gotta be at work at eight.”
“Then leave it here.”
“Griff?”
Griffin sipped his coffee. “Take it. She’ll calm down by Saturday.”
Kirk got in the truck.
He didn’t look at me when he backed out. He was gentle about it, at least. He took the corner slow so my headboard wouldn’t slide.
I stood in the driveway until the little moon was gone.
When I came back up the steps, Griffin didn’t move out of the doorway. I had to turn sideways to get past him, the way he’d turned sideways at the cupboard with twelve pounds of flour on his front.
“You just made me look like an idiot in front of my sister’s husband,” he said.
“You did that at six-forty,” I said. “I just came outside.”
Lane four
By Wednesday I’d told nobody. I’d told the milk, maybe, while putting it away.
I worked ten to six that day. By two o’clock my feet felt like somebody else’s feet that had been mailed to me in a box. I’d saved both breaks, because sitting down for fifteen minutes at four o’clock is worth more than anything on earth.
At three-ten, Tiara came through my lane.
She didn’t look at me while she unloaded. Packing tape. Two boxes of contractor bags. A jar of instant coffee the size of a paint can. Paper plates, the cheap kind that fold if you look at them.
“Hi,” I said.
“Griff said you’d be weird about it.”
I scanned the tape. “I didn’t know about it until Monday.”
She laughed once, through her nose. “Okay.”
“Tiara. I didn’t know.”
The man behind her had bananas and nothing else. He was the kind of customer who wants to be invisible and wants you to know it.
Tiara put the coffee on the belt hard enough that it rolled.
“We gave him fifteen hundred dollars on Halloween,” she said. “Cash. Three months up front. He said you wanted it before the baby came, because of the hospital. So don’t stand there and act like you got ambushed.”
My hand stopped over the scanner. The red light sat on my wrist.
Fifteen hundred dollars.
I know what fifteen hundred dollars looks like. I count drawers. I know what it looks like in twenties and what it looks like in fifties and how thick it is in a bank envelope. I knew to the dollar what was in our checking account that morning, and that number had not moved.
“I never asked you for rent,” I said.
“He said you’d say that, too.”
She took the coffee jar back from the end of the belt and put it in her own bag, like she couldn’t wait for me to bag it.
“And Kirk cracked your crib rail getting it apart,” she said. “One screw wouldn’t come out. He said whoever put it in was building a bridge.”
That was mine. That was the screw that took five tries and a flashlight in my teeth.
I nearly told her. I nearly said, I did that one bent sideways with my stomach on the rail while your brother was at league. But the bananas man was shifting his weight, and my manager was looking over from lane six, and I’m a professional.
“Fifty-three twelve,” I said.
She paid with her card. She didn’t wait for the receipt. I held it out anyway, the way you do.
“I threw you a shower in that house,” she said.
“I know. I was there.”
“He told us you’d want the help.” She lifted her bags. “Since you’re so tired all the time.”
The hook by the door
Griffin came home at six-fifty, hung his backpack on the hook by the door, and kissed me on the cheek like a man with nothing on his mind.
The plastic fish was facing out. He’d stopped tucking it under.
I had my phone on the counter with the bank app open. I’d been staring at it for twenty minutes, which is longer than I’ve stared at anything since the ultrasound.
“Where’s the fifteen hundred?”
He opened the fridge. “What fifteen hundred.”
“Tiara’s.”
A pause, with the fridge light on his face. “Oh. That. Savings.”
I turned the phone around. Savings had two hundred and twelve dollars and forty cents in it, and every one of those dollars was from Saturdays I’d picked up in September.
“I mean I put some on the truck.”
“Your truck payment is three hundred eighty-six dollars and it comes out of your check on the first. I see it every month.” I put the phone face down. “I see everything every month, Griffin. That’s what I’m for, apparently.”
He shut the fridge.
“You want receipts? You ring up cereal, Bree. You’re not my accountant.”
“No. I’m the landlord.”
That one went in. I could see it go in. His ears went red, the way they do when somebody beats him at the lane by a pin.
“Wow,” he said. “Wow. You know what, Mom’s right, you’ve changed.”
“Your mom said that?”
“She didn’t have to.”
He walked to the hook. He took the backpack down, slung it on one shoulder, and headed for the stairs.
“Why are you taking your work bag to bed?”
“Gloves are wet.”
His gloves were on the counter. They’d been on the counter since Sunday, in the little pile where Patrice dumped them out to make room for the flour. Nobody had touched them. They were as dry as my mouth.
“Your gloves are right here,” I said.
He kept going up the stairs.
Saturday at ten
Patrice called Thursday night. I’ll give her this: she didn’t pretend it was a social call.
“I have one bedroom and a sewing room the size of a phone booth,” she said. “I can’t take Tiara and Kirk. And I’m not telling my daughter to sleep in her car to win an argument with my son, even when he’s wrong.”
“So you think I should let them in.”
“I think I’ll be there Saturday,” she said, and hung up, which is how women her age say I love you.
Saturday at ten, Kirk’s truck backed into the driveway with their whole bedroom in it.
Griffin was out on the porch before the engine stopped. He carried their boxes up two at a time, bouncing on the stairs. He carried the dresser drawers stacked three high. He whistled.
“Not even heavy,” he said, passing me in the hall. Nobody had asked.
I stood in the nursery doorway the way Patrice had stood in it Monday. Shoulders on the frame. B, 13 somewhere behind my left ear.
Tiara came up the stairs with a lamp in her arms and stopped two steps from the top. She’d been crying in the truck. I can always tell; she gets pink at the nostrils, like a rabbit.
“Bree. Please.”
“I didn’t take your money.”
“Then who has it?”
Kirk came up behind her with one end of the mattress, and Griffin had the other, and the three of them filled the top of the staircase like a jam at a register when the card reader goes down.
“Move, Bree,” Griffin said.
“No.”
He set his end of the mattress down. He wanted an audience and he had one, his sister, her husband, his mother at the bottom of the stairs with her purse still on her shoulder.
“Tell them,” he said. “Tell them how much you do around here. Go on. Tell them about the milk.”
Kirk looked at the wall.
“She sits down to put groceries away,” Griffin said. “She makes a speech about it. Mom made me wear a backpack so I’d feel her pain. That’s where we’re at in this house.”
Patrice said, “Griffin.”
He didn’t stop. “She can’t stand up long enough to argue, and she wants my sister in a car.”
The tightening came again, low and hard, the practice kind the doctor said would come. Except nobody practices for it at the top of a staircase with five people looking. My knees went. I slid down the frame and sat on the top step with my hands under my stomach.
Patrice came up the stairs faster than I’d ever seen her move. She sat down next to me. She smelled like dish soap and car heater.
“Let them in tonight, baby,” she said, close to my ear. “Not for him. For her.”
I looked at Tiara with her lamp.
I moved my knees.
They carried the bed frame past me. Then the mattress. Then the lamp. I sat there and let them, because the alternative was a woman crying on my stairs with a lamp and nowhere to plug it in.
On his way back down, Kirk stopped at Griffin’s shoulder.
“You put that envelope in the bank yet? Tiara’s paranoid.”
“Monday,” Griffin said. “It’s in my bag.”
Then he stepped around me on the stairs, light as anything, and said, “See? Everybody wins.”
Through the doorway, Kirk set their headboard flat against the wall, right across B, 13.
The plastic fish
At eleven-forty that night, Griffin was asleep in his recliner in the den with the TV selling knives. Kirk was asleep upstairs in my nursery. I was in the kitchen, because when you are thirty-four weeks pregnant and furious, lying down is not available to you.
Tiara’s groceries from lane four were still on the counter in their bags. I’d been looking at that coffee jar for an hour.
She came down in socks around midnight.
“I don’t know where anything goes,” she said.
“Coffee’s above the kettle. Plates under the microwave. Flour on the second shelf.” I pointed. “Your brother knows that now. It only cost twelve pounds.”
She almost smiled. She put the coffee away. We were polite to each other the way people are polite in a waiting room.
The backpack was on the hook by the door. He’d brought it down that morning to carry the drawer pulls, and then forgotten it, because it was a moving day and he’d been busy being strong.
I took it off the hook.
“What are you doing?”
“You’re paranoid,” I said. “So am I.”
The plastic fish was cold. I pulled it around the front pocket. Inside were a pen, a tire gauge, a granola bar older than our marriage, and a bank envelope folded in half.
One twenty-dollar bill.
And a sheet of paper folded in thirds, pink, the kind you get from a carbon book. The top said ROCKFORD MONDAY NITE MEN’S LEAGUE. Under it, in somebody’s capital letters: RENO TOURNAMENT TRIP. DEC 16 TO DEC 21. BUS, HOTEL, ENTRY. $1,480. PAID CASH. And his name, spelled right, which is more than his league usually manages.
Fourteen-eighty and a twenty. I didn’t need a calculator. I’ve never needed a calculator.
Tiara read it over my shoulder. I heard her stop breathing through her nose.
“That’s our rent,” she said.
“That’s your rent.”
“He told us he was pulling doubles in December.” She sat down on the step stool by the pantry. “Warehouse overtime. That’s why you needed us here. So you wouldn’t be alone with the baby while he was at work. He said you were scared.”
“I’m due on the twentieth.”
She put her face in her hands.
It took her a minute. Then it came out of her in a long, ugly sob, the kind you can’t do quietly in somebody else’s kitchen, and I didn’t try to stop it. I put my hand on her back. Her shoulder blades were shaking like a dryer with shoes in it.
“I said all that to you,” she said into her fingers. “In your lane. In front of that banana man.”
“You said it pretty loud, too.”
She laughed, wet, horrible. Then she stood up and wiped her face with the heel of her hand and turned toward the den.
“I’m going to wake him up.”
I caught her wrist.
“No,” I said. “Let him sleep. I want him rested.”
Twelve pounds of flour
Patrice was at the door at seven-fifty Sunday morning. Tiara had called her at six. Patrice had her church coat on over a nightgown and didn’t care who knew it.
By eight, the backpack sat on the kitchen counter, zipped, full. Both bags of flour, the one I’d bought to replace hers and the one I’d bought for Christmas cookies. Twelve pounds. The pink receipt lay on top of it, flat, with the twenty-dollar bill on top of that.
I sat in the chair. I’d decided I was going to sit through the whole thing, and nobody was going to call it lazy.
Tiara stood by the sink. Kirk leaned against the fridge with his arms folded, still in the T-shirt he’d slept in. Patrice took the chair beside mine, the way she had a week before.
Griffin came in from the den in his socks, scratching his neck.
He saw the backpack first. He smiled.
“What is this, round two?”
“Read it to your sister,” I said.
He picked up the receipt. I saw him read it. I saw him read it again, as if it might have changed since he folded it.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay. This is not what it looks like.”
Nobody said anything. That bothered him more than yelling would have. He’s a man who needs something to push against.
“It’s one week. One week. You know how long the guys have been planning this? Since March. I’ve worked fifty hours a week since I was nineteen years old. Nineteen. I have never once taken a trip.”
“You took two trips to Wisconsin Dells,” Patrice said.
“Those were for the league.” He turned to me. “I’d be back on the twenty-first, Bree. The twenty-first.”
“I’m due the twentieth.”
“Nobody has a baby on the due date. That’s made up. That’s a number the doctor picks. Mom had me two weeks late.”
“I had you nine days late,” Patrice said. “And your father was in the room holding my leg.”
“That’s not the same thing.”
“It’s exactly the same thing.”
He put the receipt down and picked it up again. His ears were going red.
“Here’s what nobody in this kitchen is seeing,” he said, louder. “I set it up. I SET IT UP so she’d have help. Tiara’s here. Kirk’s here. Mom’s twenty minutes away. She’d have had more people around her than she knows what to do with. You’re welcome, by the way.”
“With my money,” Kirk said.
“I was going to pay it back.”
“With what?”
Griffin looked at him like Kirk had changed the rules in the middle of a game.
“With my check, Kirk, with my check, what do you think?”
“Your check,” Kirk said, “pays a truck.”
Griffin turned back to me, because I was the one sitting down, and when he’s losing he goes after whoever’s lowest.
“What do you even need me there for?” he said. “Seriously. Name one thing. You’ll be lying down the whole time. You’re good at that.”
Kirk came off the fridge.
He didn’t touch Griffin. He just stood up straight, and Kirk standing up straight in a kitchen is like a refrigerator deciding to walk. Griffin took one step back without meaning to.
Tiara picked the twenty off the counter. She walked over to her brother and pressed it flat onto his chest with her whole hand.
“Here’s your change,” she said.
He didn’t take it. It slid down his shirt and landed on his sock.
Patrice stood up. Her chair went back on the linoleum with a sound like a dropped pan.
“You took your sister’s last fifteen hundred dollars,” she said. “You sold her a room in your wife’s house. You sold your wife’s nursery. So you could go bowling in Nevada while she had your daughter.” She said it in the same voice she uses to read a recipe. “Did I leave anything out?”
“Mom.”
“Did I leave anything out, Griffin?”
He looked at the floor. At the twenty on his sock.
“It’s Grandma Hattie’s house,” I said. “The deed has my name on it.”
“Here we go.” But it came out small this time. Nobody laughed.
“Tiara and Kirk are staying through March,” I said.
Griffin’s head came up. Tiara’s did too. She hadn’t expected it either.
“They get the den,” I said.
“My den?”
“Your trophies go in Kirk’s truck. My crib comes out of it.”
He actually laughed, one short bark, like I’d made a joke at a funeral. Then he looked at his mother, and at Kirk, and at his sister, and he stopped.
“And where am I supposed to sleep? The garage?”
“My sewing room,” Patrice said. “There’s a cot. You’ll do your own laundry. I’ll show you where the soap goes, since you have trouble with shelves.”
“Mom, you can’t be serious.”
“I’ve been serious since Sunday.”
Then he did the thing I’d been waiting nine days for and didn’t enjoy at all. He came around the counter and got down on his knees next to my chair. Right there on Grandma Hattie’s linoleum, in his socks, with a twenty stuck to one of them.
“Bree. Come on. I’ll cancel. I’ll call today. I’ll cancel the whole thing.”
“Yes,” I said. “You will.”
“I’ll pay Kirk back. Every dollar. Bree. Please.”
“Get up.”
He got up.
“Go pack,” I said.
He went upstairs. We heard drawers. We heard him say something to himself in the bedroom that I won’t repeat. Kirk went out to the truck and started undoing the bungee cord on my crib without anybody telling him to.
Griffin came back down carrying his clothes in my laundry basket. The big plastic one. He held it against his front, the way he’d held the flour, and he had to turn sideways to get it through the kitchen door.
Patrice held the screen door for him. She let it close behind him on its own.
December twenty-first
Monday after work, Griffin drove to the bowling alley and came home with eleven hundred and eighty dollars. The bus deposit was three hundred, and the bus deposit was gone.
Wednesday he sold his ball and his bag to a man from the warehouse for exactly three hundred. He’d had the ball since he was twenty-four. He used to polish it with a sock while he watched TV.
Thursday night he put the money on my kitchen counter. Eleven-eighty, three hundred, and the twenty Tiara had stuck on his chest, which Patrice had picked up off my floor and kept in her coat pocket all week like a receipt.
Kirk counted it. Then he counted it again, slower. Fifteen hundred dollars, even.
“Tell him he’s short a thank-you,” Kirk said, and put it in his wallet.
The eleven trophies went in the back of Kirk’s truck, the same truck my crib had left in. Patrice took them into her garage. She’d said no to the crib. She said yes to the trophies, because they were his, and she liked having something of his where she could see it.
The den became Tiara and Kirk’s. Tiara put a blanket over the recliner and called it a reading chair. Nobody read in it. Kirk slept in it twice.
That Saturday, Griffin came over with a new crib rail he’d bought off the manufacturer’s website. Forty-six dollars and ninety-nine cents. I know because he showed me the receipt without being asked.
Patrice was waiting for him at the nursery door. She held up the backpack.
“Twelve pounds,” she said. “On your front. While you build it.”
He looked at her a long time. Then he put it on.
It took him most of the afternoon. Kirk sat on the floor handing him screws and saying nothing helpful. Tiara brought him water and didn’t bring him a straw. The last screw, the one at the bottom of the new rail, took him eleven tries. He kept leaning in, and the flour kept hitting the rail, and he kept backing up.
“I can’t see the hole,” he said.
“Neither could I,” I said.
He got it on the twelfth. He sat back on his heels. He put one hand on the rail and shook it, gently, like he was asking it a question.
That night, after he’d gone back to his mother’s, I sat on the nursery carpet where the crib’s feet had made their four little dents. They were dents again now. Patrice sat down beside me. She’s sixty-five and it took her a while.
I cried then. Finally. Big and stupid, nine days of it, with my face on her shoulder and my hand on the moon on the headboard. She didn’t tell me to stop. She rubbed my back and said, “Heavy, isn’t it,” and let me go until I was done.
Griffin came every day after that. He carried the groceries all the way in. He put the milk away. He asked where things went, and he wrote my answers on an index card and taped it inside the cupboard, and Tiara said it was the first thing he’d ever written down that wasn’t a bowling score. Every night, around nine, he drove back to the sewing room.
On December nineteenth, a day early, I had a girl. Seven pounds nine ounces. We named her Hattie. Griffin stood by my head the whole time and held my hand until I broke one of his knuckles, or he says I did, and I let him say it.
On December twenty-first, the day the Reno bus came back to Rockford without him, he drove us home.
He carried the car seat up the porch steps and through the entrance.
And he stopped there. He waited.
“Where do you want her?” he said.
“Nursery.”
He carried her down the hall slowly, with both hands, like a man carrying something that could spill. At the door he stopped again, under the pencil marks, and shifted his grip.
“She’s heavier than she looks,” he said.
“I know,” I said, and I lifted my daughter out of the seat and carried her past B, 13 into her room myself.
If you’ve ever been called lazy by somebody who never once carried your load, send this to the woman in your life who’d have handed him that flour.
Family loyalties can get complicated fast – see what happened in “My Father Charged Me Before I Got My First Paycheck” and “My Father Told Me To Keep My Son Upstairs”. For another painful family betrayal, read “My Daughter Posted That I Died, and 206 People Said Sorry”.
