The Baby He Would Not Take Home

I handed her June and I went and sat on the edge of my bed and cried into a towel so she would not hear me. When I came out Faye had June asleep on her shoulder and the kitchen clean and a list on the counter in her blocky handwriting, a schedule of women. Monday nights, the Hollerans. Tuesdays, the quilting circle would rotate. Wednesday the church had a mothers’ morning. She had organized my whole life in twenty minutes the way she organized the Friday fish fry.

I want to tell you about those women, because they are the real story and Cole is only the thing that started it.

There was Connie Baum, who had been a labor nurse in Des Moines for thirty years before she retired back to Lindell, and who came over the first week and showed me how to swaddle so June would stop fighting her own arms, and how to tell a hungry cry from a tired cry, and who left her phone number on the fridge and said call me at any hour and I mean it. There was the quilting circle at First Lutheran, six women in their sixties and seventies who had buried husbands and raised grandchildren and who, without being asked, pieced June a quilt out of their own scrap baskets, every square from a different dress or shirt with a story in it, so that my daughter slept under a blanket made of the whole town’s history.

There was Pastor Dean, who did not come to convert me or to scold me or to ask me the delicate question about the father. He came and sat on my porch and drank bad coffee and held the baby and said almost nothing, which is a rarer gift in a pastor than you would think. The one thing he did say, I have kept. He said, Nora, people are going to call this a sad story. Do not let them. A baby who is wanted this much is not a sad story. You remember that on the hard nights.