The Baby Who Looked Like Hers

He didn’t answer, because what was there to say. He had seen it too.

I want to tell you that I handled the months that followed with grace. I did not. I handled them like a wounded animal, which is to say I bit anyone who came near the sore spot. Loretta did not come to the hospital again. She did not come to the house when we brought Nell home. She sent food, which is what a Kentucky woman does when she cannot stand to be in a room, she cooks her way out of it, and every few days there would be a foil pan on our porch, chicken and dumplings, a pound cake, a green bean casserole, no note. Wade would drive the empty pans back out to the farm and come home and tell me she was fine, she was just going through something, give her time.

Give her time. I had a newborn who did not sleep and leaking everything and a body that did not feel like mine and a grandmother forty minutes away who sent casseroles instead of coming to hold the baby, and I was supposed to give her time. I started to hate her. I am not proud of the word but it is the true one. At Nell’s first Christmas, six weeks old, Loretta held her for exactly as long as it took for a picture to be taken and then handed her back to me like I had asked her to hold a hot pan, and I saw her hands shaking, and I thought, she is shaking because she cannot wait to be rid of her, and I took my daughter into the back bedroom and I cried into her hair and I told Wade in the truck on the way home that I was done trying.

“I mean it,” I said. “I am not going to beg that woman to love our child. If she can’t, that’s her loss, and Nell will grow up knowing which grandmother showed up.”

Wade drove a while before he said anything. Then he said, “There’s things about my mother you don’t know.”

“Then tell me,” I said.

And he said, “I don’t know all of them either.”

I thought that was a cop out. I was angry enough that everything sounded like a cop out. But he was telling me the truth. That was the thing I did not understand yet. Wade did not know, not really, because it had happened before he was born and it had been sealed shut in that house like a room nobody opens, and the only reason he knew there was a room at all was that he had grown up feeling the cold coming off the door.

It was Wade’s aunt Darlene who finally started to turn the key, and she did not even mean to.