The Mother In Law Who Stayed

So when I opened the door and saw her standing on my porch with a suitcase, the first thing I felt was dread. I thought Travis had sent her. I thought she had come to tell me his side, to smooth it over, to talk me into something.

“Lorene,” I said. “Travis isn’t here.”

“I know he isn’t,” she said. “That’s why I came.”

She looked at me a long moment, her eyes going down to my belly and back up to my face, and whatever she saw there, it changed something in her jaw.

“I’m going to ask you one time and I want the truth,” she said. “Did my son leave you? With the baby coming sick?”

I did not have it in me to lie, or to protect him, or to protect myself. I just nodded.

Lorene closed her eyes. When she opened them they were wet, and her voice when it came out was low and furious in a way I had never heard from her, in a way that was not aimed at me at all.

“That boy,” she said. “That no-account boy.”

And then she picked up her suitcase, and she stepped past me into the house, and she set it down in the middle of my living room floor like she was planting a flag.

“Where’s the room with the crib,” she said. “Show me. I’ve slept on worse than a floor but I’d rather not, at my age.”

I stood there with the door still open. “Lorene, I don’t understand.”

She turned around. And here is the part I have told maybe four people in my whole life, because it is the part that undoes me every time.

“He called me two nights ago,” she said. “Drunk, out at that Dewey’s place. Called to tell me he’d done it, he’d got himself free of it, like he expected me to be proud. Told me the baby’s sick and it was going to cost a fortune and he wasn’t going to be chained to that.” She said the word chained like it tasted bad. “And he said the thing you probably already heard him say. That she’s your problem.”

I could not say anything.

“I raised him,” Lorene said. “So some of that is on me, and I’ll carry it. But I did not raise him to say that about a baby. I did not raise him to leave a woman alone at the end of a county road eight weeks from her time.” She looked around the little living room, at the heating pad on the couch, at the plate of meatloaf going cold on the counter, at the whole small shape of my situation. “So I packed a bag. And I told my girls I didn’t know when I’d be back. And I drove here. Because somebody in this family is going to stand by that child, and if it isn’t going to be her daddy, then by God it’s going to be her grandmother.”