The Baby He Would Not Take Home

There is one night I think about. June was maybe six weeks old and she had been crying since supper, the kind of crying that has no bottom to it, and I had tried everything in Connie’s list and the baby book and my own two empty hands, and around midnight I just sat down on the kitchen floor with my back against the cabinets and cried right along with her. I had the phone in my hand to call Connie and I could not even make myself dial, I was so sure by then that I was the wrong person, that some real mother out there would have known what to do and I was only a stand-in who was going to ruin this child. And then there was a knock on my door. It was Vern Holleran’s wife, Pearl, in her nightgown and a coat, holding a hot water bottle. She said she had seen my kitchen light on from across the street three nights running and figured colic. She did not ask to come in. She just came in, took June, laid her belly-down along her forearm with the warm bottle against her, and walked my kitchen in slow circles humming something with no tune, and inside of ten minutes my daughter was asleep for the first time in five hours. Pearl stayed until two. She did not say much. When she left she said, you are doing fine, you just cannot see it from the inside, nobody can. I have held that sentence like a stone in my pocket for seven years.

And there were other hard nights. I will not lie about that part either. There were nights I called Connie at three in the morning sobbing because June would not stop screaming and I was sure I was failing her, I was not her mother, I did not know the secret thing a real mother would know. Connie would come in her robe and take the baby and walk the floor and tell me that there was no secret thing, that every mother on earth is making it up as she goes, that the only difference between me and a real mother was a piece of paper and I should stop confusing paper with love. She said that a lot, that town. Stop confusing paper with love.

I did eventually get the papers. I am not going to drag you through it. It took the better part of a year, and a kind woman at the county who walked me through forms, and Brynn standing up when it counted, quietly, with no fuss, saying yes, I want Nora to have her, I am sure. Brynn moved to Cedar Rapids that spring and got herself into a program and a job, and she writes to June twice a year, on her birthday and at Christmas, letters I keep in a box for when June is old enough to want them. Brynn did a hard, good thing. I will not let anyone in this story be only a villain except the one who earned it.

That one is my brother.

Cole did not call for four months. When he finally did, it was not to ask about June. It was to ask if I had gotten anything of Mom’s that might be worth something, because he was short on rent. I stood in my kitchen with June on my hip, eight months old by then and grabbing at the phone cord, and I listened to my brother ask me about money while his daughter babbled into the receiver, and he did not ask who the noise was. He did not ask.