The Baby Who Looked Like Hers

The Hollis place is out past the grain elevator on a gravel lane, a white farmhouse that Wade’s father, Earl, keeps up better than most men keep their own teeth. Earl is a quiet, kind man who smells like diesel and peppermint and who will fix anything you put in front of him without being asked. And then there is Loretta.

I will tell you how Loretta was with me from the start, so you understand what I was working with. She was not cruel. I want to be fair. She never once raised her voice at me. But she was cold in a way that was worse than yelling, because yelling you can answer and cold you cannot. She was a church woman, choir and casserole and the second pew from the front every Sunday of her life, and she ran that house the way some women run a church kitchen, with a tight smile and a place for everything and absolutely no patience for your feelings about any of it. The first time Wade brought me out to supper she looked at me across the table like I was a stain she was deciding whether she could get out. She asked where my people were from. She asked what my daddy did. When I told her, she said, “Propane,” in a voice that managed to make the word sound like a diagnosis.

For eight years that was how it went between us. Thanksgivings where she passed me the dishes but not her eyes. Birthdays where she gave me a card with a ten dollar bill in it and a look that said she had thought about making it five. She loved Wade, I could see that she loved Wade, but it was a guarded, watchful kind of love, like she was always braced for something. I used to tell Wade she was a hard woman and he would get quiet and say, “She wasn’t always,” and he would not say more than that, and I took it for a son making excuses. I know better now.

When I got pregnant, I thought it might soften her. People will tell you a baby fixes things in a family. That is one of the lies we pass around like a casserole dish. I called her myself to tell her, because I wanted to do it right, and there was a silence on the line so long I thought the call had dropped. Then she said, “Well,” and then she said she had to get the beans off the stove, and she hung up. Wade said she was just surprised. I told myself he was right.

She did not come to the shower. She sent a gift, a yellow blanket, store bought, with the tag still on. She did not touch my belly, not once, not the whole nine months, where every other woman in that town had her hands on me like I was public property. At the family Easter when I was seven months along and big as a hay bale, she sat across the room from me the entire afternoon and I caught her, more than once, looking at my stomach with an expression I could not read. It was not disgust. I know that now. At the time I thought it was. At the time I thought, she cannot even stand to look at the baby and it is not even born yet.