The Baby Who Looked Like Hers

She did not want to let me in. I could see it. But she was a church woman and you do not leave a mother and a baby standing on your porch, so she held the door and I came in, and the house smelled like coffee and furniture polish and underneath it something older, the smell of a house where the same people have lived a very long time. She did not offer to take the baby. She sat down in her chair by the front window and folded her hands and waited, braced, the way she was always braced, and I understood for the first time that the bracing was not meanness. It was fear. The woman had been afraid of something for as long as I had known her.

I had planned a whole speech. I had planned to be calm and to use my words and to give her every chance. Instead I set Nell’s car seat down on the floor between us, and Nell was awake, looking around with those deep dark eyes, and I said, “I need you to tell me why you can’t look at my daughter. Because I have decided you hate her, and I am about to raise her to believe that, and if I am wrong, this is your one chance to tell me so. I will not come back and ask again.”

Loretta looked at the baby. She looked for a long time. And then that same thing started to happen to her face that had happened in the hospital, the lights going out room by room, except this time she did not get up and leave. This time she put both her hands over her mouth and her shoulders started to shake and my hard, cold, church pew mother in law began to cry in a way I did not know she had in her, a terrible dry heaving cry like something being pulled up out of a well that had been capped for forty years.

I did not go to her. God forgive me, I just sat there. I was still braced to be hurt.

When she could talk, she did not look at me. She looked at Nell. And she said, “Her name was Faye.”

I did not say anything. I knew, the way you know you are about to be told the thing that explains everything, that I needed to not say one word.

“She was my first,” Loretta said. “Before Wade. Before any of them. Earl and I married young and she came the first year and she was.” She stopped. She pressed her hand flat on her chest. “She had dark hair just like that, come in thick from the start, everybody said it. And she had my mother’s eyes, deep set, dark, and she had.” Loretta’s voice went to almost nothing. “She had a little mark. A little dark mark, shaped like a new moon, right here, behind her left ear, where the hair didn’t quite cover it.”