The girl at my kitchen counter
Sophie came into our lives when Jacob was twenty-six. He brought her home for Thanksgiving, and I watched them come up my front walk holding hands, and I loved her before she even got her coat off, because Jacob looked at her the way I had always hoped somebody would.
She was pretty in a soft, tired way, the way young women look when they have been working too hard for too little. She was in nursing school then, second year, and drowning in it. Tuition, textbooks, clinical hours, a part-time job at a nursing home in Lafayette that paid almost nothing and asked everything. She sat at my kitchen counter that first Thanksgiving and told me about it while Jacob was out in the garage with the neighbor, and I recognized the look on her face. It was my own look from thirty years back. The look of someone trying to build a life out of scraps and hope.
“I want to be a labor and delivery nurse,” she told me. “I want to be the one who hands the baby to the mother. That first second. I want to be there for that.”
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I liked her for that. I have always trusted people more by what they long to do than by what they say they believe. Anybody can say they are a good person. It takes something real to want to spend your life catching other people’s babies and handing them over in that first holy second.
Over the next two years I helped her. I want to be honest that it was not a small thing. When her financial aid fell through one semester, I paid the balance so she would not have to drop out and lose her whole cohort. When her car died on Route 39 in January, I co-signed the loan for the used Honda that got her to her clinicals. When she was so exhausted from a double shift that she cried at my kitchen counter and said she did not think she could finish, I made her tea and told her she was already the kind of nurse those mothers deserved, and she gripped my hand and said, “I will pay you back for all of it. I promise. The second I graduate, every dollar.”
“You will do no such thing,” I told her. “You will pass your boards and you will catch those babies and you will let me hold my grandbabies someday. That is how you pay me back.”