The Apron My Mother-in-Law Handed Me
Then she stood up, and she did the thing that I think of whenever I hear someone say that Marge was shamed that day. She did not leave. She went into the kitchen and tied on an apron of her own from the drawer and started slicing the ham. Donna got up and did the plates. Jean made coffee. In ten minutes eight women in their sixties and seventies and eighties had put on their own luncheon, and they sat Marge down in a chair at the head of it and would not let her up.
Nobody played a hand of bridge that Thursday. In thirty eight years of that club, it was the first time.
Before the bars were served, whichever kind they were, Phyllis went out on the front porch with her telephone and called the elevator and asked the girl in the office to get Ben off the scale.
On her way back in she found the apron on the railing. She told me she stood and looked at it a good while. Then she folded it and brought it inside and put it in her own purse.
It was dark by seven. My father had gone out to sit on the front steps after supper, which is where he sits, with his coffee, in his jacket. I was in the rocker with the lamp on low.
I saw the headlights turn in off the county road. I knew the car. It was mine.
It stopped behind the truck. The door opened and the dome light came on, and Ben got out, and went around to the trunk, and stood there a minute with it open.
Through the window glass I heard my father say, “Evening, Ben.”
“Dean.”
“She’s inside. Baby just went down.”
“Is she all right?”
“She’s wore out,” my father said. “She’s all right.”
There was a long quiet. I could see Ben’s shape in the yard light, and that he was holding something large against his chest.
“I read the whole sheet,” Ben said. “In the parking lot at work. I had it in the glove box the whole time. I never read past the walking.”
“No,” my father said.
“I don’t have anything to say for myself.”
“Then don’t say it,” my father said, not hard. “Carry that in before the dew gets on it.”
He got up and held the screen door.
Ben came in sideways with the bassinet in his arms. He had not folded it because he had not known how. He had driven seventy five miles with it wedged across the back seat.
He set it down on the floor of my father’s front room. He had left work at one, when the girl in the office came out to the scale and said his aunt was on the telephone and that he had better take it. He had gone to his mother’s house. He had packed in twenty minutes. He had brought the pump and every piece of it in a grocery sack, and my pillow, and the stool softener, which I would not have thought a man would know to bring.
He looked at me in my mother’s chair. His eyes were red around the edges.
He did not say he was sorry right then. He said that later, in the dark, many times, and I will keep those to myself. What he said in the front room was this.
“What time does she eat next?”
“Nine. Then about half past eleven. Then two.”
“Show me how to do the two o’clock,” he said. “Show me all of it. I’ll do the two o’clock and the one after it.”