The Mother In Law Who Stayed
His two sisters came.
Lorene’s girls. They drove the two hours from up in the hills, the both of them, and they found me by the cake table and introduced themselves because we had barely met, and the older one, Dana, took both my hands and said, “Mama told us what he did. We’re ashamed of him. We’re not ashamed of being this baby’s family. You’ve got aunts now, whether you want us or not.”
That is when it stopped being a story about a man who left. Standing in that fire hall with his mother holding one of my hands and his sister holding the other, I understood that Travis had walked out of a family and I had walked into one. He had traded his daughter for a room at Dewey’s and a radio turned up loud. And these women, his women, had looked at what he did and decided it would not be the last word.
My daughter was born eleven days later, on a Wednesday morning, in the hospital in Louisville, in a room where they were ready for her heart. I named her June, for the month my own mother was born in. Lorene was in the room. She cut the cord. I asked her to. There was no one on this earth I would rather have had cut it.
June had her first surgery at four months. I will not take you through those days because they are mine and they are hard and they came out all right in the end, which is the part that matters. She came through it. The doctors were as good as everyone promised. The hole closed. The valve held. The hospital bills came, and they were a mountain, but it was a mountain I did not have to climb alone, because there was a jar from a fire hall and a town behind me and a woman with a cardinal notebook who kept every receipt and knew who to call.
June is three now. She runs. Lord, does she run. She has a scar down the center of her chest that she is proud of, that she will show anybody, that she calls her zipper. She lives with her grandmother and me in a little house in Delcie that I was finally able to buy, the loose step fixed, the storm door quiet. Lorene never did go home. Her girls come most Sundays. We are a household of women and a loud three-year-old and it is the happiest home I have ever lived in.
Travis I have seen twice. Once at the courthouse in Carranville, for the divorce, which was simple because there was nothing to fight over, he wanted nothing, which told the truth about him better than any words. And once at the Save-A-Lot, a year or so back, where he was buying a twelve-pack and he saw me and June in the cart and he looked at her, at his daughter, at the little girl with the dark hair and the scar she’d have shown him if he’d asked, and he opened his mouth, and I just shook my head, once, and pushed the cart on past. There was nothing he could say. He had said the only thing that mattered three years before, on his way out a storm door. She’s your problem.