The Apron My Mother-in-Law Handed Me
I laid Nora in the bassinet beside the bed. I took my phone off the nightstand. I went into the bathroom across the hall, which was the only door on that floor that locked, and I sat down on the edge of the tub and I called my father.
He answered on the second ring. I could hear the shop behind him, the compressor running. My father is a mechanic for the county highway department in Davison County, an hour and a half north of Yankton.
“Kelsey Jo,” he said. “Everything all right?”
I had meant to explain. What came out was, “Dad, can you come get me.”
The compressor noise got farther away. He had walked outside.
“Are you hurt?”
“No.”
“Is the baby hurt?”
“No. She’s fine. She’s asleep.” I pressed the heel of my hand against my eyes. “I’m just not able, Dad. I’m not able to do what they want and I can’t make them hear it.”
He did not ask what they wanted. He did not ask where Ben was. I have thought about that a great deal since. He was sixty years old and he had raised me, the last four years of it on his own after my mother passed, and he knew the difference between when I was complaining and when I was telling him something.
“I’m getting my keys,” he said. “It’s ninety minutes. You stay sitting down till I get there.”
“Okay.”
“All right then,” he said, and I heard the truck door, and that was all.
I sat on the edge of the tub for a minute more. Then I sent Ben a message, because he was my husband and it was his daughter.
I wrote: Dad is coming for Nora and me. I can’t do the luncheon. I’m not mad. I’m just not able. We’ll be at his place.
It showed as delivered and nothing else. Ben kept his phone in his locker during harvest. A man working around the pit and the leg of an elevator does not carry one in his shirt pocket. He would not see it until noon.
Downstairs I heard Marge’s car back out.
It took me most of that ninety minutes to get ready, and I was not taking much.
I fed Nora, and pumped, and gave her the ounce on top. I put on the only things that did not press on me, which were a pair of Ben’s sweatpants and my old gray sweatshirt from the technical college, and my slippers, because bending to tie a shoe was beyond me. I braided my hair over one shoulder without looking at it.
I packed the diaper bag. Diapers, wipes, the two sleepers that fit, the can of formula, four bottles. My pills in their orange bottles and the discharge sheet folded around them.
I should say how we came to be in that room at all.
Ben and I had bought a house on Pine Street in June, a little one story place from 1954 with good bones and bad wiring. The plan had been to have the electrical and the floors done by Labor Day and be moved in a month before my due date. The electrician ran three weeks behind and then five. Our apartment lease ran out on the thirtieth of September. Marge had the room, and she offered it, and I was grateful.