The Apron My Mother-in-Law Handed Me

She was not a cruel woman. I had known her six years. She was a woman who had farmed outside Tabor for thirty years with Ben’s father, Ray, and moved into town after he died, and she ran her house the way she had run that farm, by the list and by the clock. She had simply never in her life seen a reason that something could not be done, and so she did not see one in me.

At half past eight I carried the diaper bag down. Then I went back up, and I carried the empty car seat down, which weighed about what Nora weighed. I set them both on the porch beside the front door.

Then I went up a third time, which was two trips more than the sheet allowed for a whole day, and I sat on the bed and waited.

Marge came home at twenty five past nine with her hair set. I heard her come in the back, and the purse go down on the counter, and then a long quiet in which she was looking at a kitchen with nothing done in it.

“Kelsey?”

Her feet came to the bottom of the stairs.

“Kelsey, those tables aren’t up.”

“No,” I said from the top. “They aren’t.”

She stood there a moment. Then she went to the basement door, and I heard her go down, and I heard the first card table knock against the stair wall as she brought it up herself. She was sixty two and strong as a fence post.

At twenty to ten I heard my father’s truck.

I knew it by the sound before I saw it. It is an ’05 Silverado, the crew cab, white once, with two hundred and fourteen thousand miles on it. He pulled to the curb in front of the house and shut it off.

I wrapped Nora in the white blanket the hospital had sent home with us. I came down the fourteen stairs for the last time that day, both feet on every step.

The apron was still over the back of the kitchen chair where Marge had laid it. I could see it from the foot of the stairs. I went in and picked it up with my free hand, and I carried it out the front door with me, and I hung it over the porch railing, smoothed out flat so that it would not blow off.

I think I wanted it understood that I had not thrown it down. I had only not put it on.

My father was coming up the walk. He had on his brown work jacket with the county patch, and his cap, and he had not shaved. He came as far as the porch steps and stopped there. He would not have walked into another woman’s house without being asked if it had been burning.

He looked at me. He looked at how I was standing.

“Well, look at you two,” he said quietly.

He picked up the car seat and the diaper bag in one hand and went back down the walk. He had the seat belted into the back of the cab before I reached the bottom step, threading the lap belt through the guides the way the nurse had shown us for a vehicle without the base. He pulled on it twice to test it.

The front door opened behind me.

“Where on earth are you going?”

Marge stood in the doorway with a folding chair under each arm.

“To my dad’s,” I said. “Nora and I. I left Ben a message.”

“With company coming in two hours.”

“Yes.”

She looked past me at the truck, and at my father, who lifted two fingers off the door frame to her, civil, and said nothing.