The Apron My Mother-in-Law Handed Me
“I never heard of such a thing,” she said. It was not angry. It was honest bewilderment, and I believed it. “Walking out on a little bit of work.”
I had used my one sentence already. I did not have another, and I found I did not need one.
“I’ll have Ben call you,” I said.
I went down the front walk in my slippers. It was a bright morning, cold at the edges, the maples on Marge’s street gone half yellow. My father stood at the curb holding the back door of the truck open, and he took Nora from me and set her in the seat and did the buckles with his big cracked hands, slow, checking each one. Then he held my elbow while I got up into the cab beside her.
There was a bed pillow on the seat. It had a faded pillowcase with blue cornflowers on it. It was from my own bed, in my own room, in the house I grew up in.
“For the belt,” my father said. “And the bumps. Your mother had to hold one, with you.”
I had not known that. In twenty nine years nobody had mentioned it.
I held the pillow against my stomach, and he shut the door as gently as you would shut a door on a sleeping house, and we went.
He did not ask me anything until we were north of town and past the last of the grain trucks waiting to turn in at the elevator.
“You want to tell me,” my father said, “or you want to ride.”
“Ride,” I said. “For a while.”
So we rode. He drove five under the whole way, and he slowed for every railroad crossing as though there were eggs in the bed. Nora slept. I kept my hand on her chest to feel it go up and down.
Somewhere around Freeman I told him. The envelope, the roaster, the chairs. What Ben said with his boot half on.
My father listened to all of it with his eyes on the road.
“He’s a good boy,” he said, when I had finished. “He’s just tired and he believed the wrong woman.” He thought about that. “Believed the right one too. Just not the whole page.”
“It’s his place to come,” he said. “We’ll see if he knows it.”
The house I grew up in is eight miles out of Mitchell, a white farmhouse on five acres.
Inside, in the front room, he had moved my mother’s rocker from their bedroom out to the window. He must have done it in the two minutes between hanging up the phone and getting into the truck.
“Bed’s made up in your room,” he said, “but that’s upstairs, so you’ll take mine. I put clean sheets on Sunday. I’ll take the couch.”
I sat down in my mother’s rocker with my daughter, and I did not get up again for anything but the bathroom for the rest of that day. He brought me a grilled cheese sandwich cut corner to corner and a glass of milk.
I slept three hours in a row that afternoon. It was the longest I had slept since the first of October. When I woke up, he was in the kitchen doorway with Nora on his forearm like a football, swaying, telling her in a low voice about the starter on a John Deere road grader.