The Mother In Law Who Stayed

My Husband Left Weeks Before Our Sick Baby Came And His Own Mother Showed Up At My Door

The night Travis left, the dogwood out front was already dropping its petals on the gravel, and I remember thinking the yard looked like somebody had thrown a wedding there and nobody came.

I was thirty-one weeks along. I could not see my own feet. I had spent the afternoon on the couch with a heating pad and a glass of flat ginger ale, counting the little flutters and kicks the way the book told me to, and when Travis came in from the shop with grease to his elbows I thought he might sit with me a while. He did not. He stood in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room with his cap still on and told me he had been thinking.

A man who tells you he has been thinking has already finished thinking. I know that now. I did not know it then.

We lived outside a town called Delcie, Kentucky, which you will not find on most maps because it is really just a crossroads with a church, a feed store, a diner, and a volunteer fire hall that doubles as the place you vote. The nearest real town, Carranville, was twenty minutes down a county road past three dairy farms and a cattle gate that somebody always left open. Travis worked at the auto shop in Carranville, under the lift all day, and I waited tables at the Blue Spoon out on the highway, mornings mostly, until I got too big to carry the trays and Dolores put me on the register instead.

So when he said he had been thinking, I turned the television down and waited, the way you wait for weather.

“The doctor thing,” he said. “The heart thing. I can’t do it, Rachel.”

The heart thing. That is what he called it. Three weeks before, at the appointment in Carranville where they do the big ultrasound, the technician had gone quiet in a way that made my stomach drop, and then she had left the room, and then a doctor came in and sat down on the little rolling stool and told us our daughter had a hole in her heart and a valve that had not formed the way it should. He used words I had to write on the back of a receipt so I could look them up later. He said she would need surgery. Maybe more than one. He said babies do well with it now, that the odds were good, that the hospital in Louisville was one of the best in the country for exactly this. He said a lot of hopeful things in a very careful voice.

Travis had not said a word the whole time. In the truck on the way home he had turned the radio up loud, and I had let him, because I thought he was scared the way I was scared, and I thought scared people sometimes need the radio.