The Apron My Mother-in-Law Handed Me

Then it was Marge and me and the clock over the stove.

I said it once. I am glad that I said it, and glad that I only said it once.

“Marge, I can’t lift anything heavier than Nora. I’m not supposed to do the stairs but once a day. The staples only came out Sunday. It’s just paper strips holding it.”

She was already at the sink with her back to me, running water into the coffeepot.

“A roaster’s not heavier than a baby if you take the lid off and make two trips,” she said. “And the chairs you bring one at a time. Nobody’s asking you to run.”

“I don’t think I can do it.”

“You’d be surprised what you can do.” She shut the water off. She turned around then and looked at me, not unkindly, the way she might look at a cake to see if it was done. “Lying around is the worst thing for it, Kelsey. That’s how the blood goes bad. You get up, and you do, and it knits. That’s how it’s done.”

She dried her hands on the towel that hung from the oven door.

“I’ve got my hair at eight,” she said. “I’ll be back by half past nine to do the bars. You’ll have the tables up by then.”

She went to get her purse.

I stood there with my daughter breathing against my neck, looking at an apron on a chair.

I want to tell you why I did not argue, because I know there are women reading this who would have.

I was nine days out. I had slept in pieces no longer than ninety minutes since the hospital. My milk had been slow and Nora had been slow to gain, so I was nursing and then pumping and then giving her an ounce of formula on top, every two and a half hours, and by the time one round was finished it was nearly time for the next. I had exactly one plain sentence in me, and I had used it, and it had run off of her like water off the hood of a car.

I did not have a second one.

And I could not simply get in the car and go, because I was not cleared to drive for another week, and the car had just backed out of the driveway with my husband in it.

So I did the thing that was still left to me. I went upstairs.

There were fourteen stairs in Marge’s house. I knew that number too. Our room was at the top of them, the one that had been Ben’s when he was a boy, with the slanted ceiling and the double bed pushed into the corner. There was a sewing room on the main floor with a daybed in it, and when we moved in at the end of September I had asked, carefully, whether we might use that one after the baby came. Marge had said the sewing room had her quilt frame set up and a quilt in it for the church auction, and it could not be disturbed, and anyhow stairs were good for a person.

I went up them one at a time with my right hand on the rail and my left arm around Nora, bringing both feet onto each step before I tried the next. By the top there was a pulling all along the incision, a hot line like a wire drawn tight.