The Apron My Mother-in-Law Handed Me
“You have to be at work at six.”
“I called Jeff from the road.” Jeff ran the elevator. “I told him I needed the rest of the week and Monday, and I told him why. I said I knew it was harvest.” Ben rubbed his face with both hands. “He said he’s got four kids, and he’d been wondering since the day I came back when I was going to ask.”
My father had come in behind him and was standing by the door with his cap in his hand.
“There’s a plate in the oven,” he said to Ben. “Wash up first.”
That was the whole of the welcome, and the whole of the reckoning, and Ben understood it for both.
At two in the morning I woke to Nora fussing and reached for her out of habit, and she was not there. The bedroom door was open a few inches. I got up, slowly, hand on the wall, and looked down the hall into the kitchen.
My husband was standing at the stove in his undershirt, holding a bottle in a pan of warm water, and my father was standing next to him in his, showing him how to shake a drop on the inside of his wrist. Nora was up on my father’s shoulder making her small goat noises.
“Not hot,” my father was saying. “You don’t want to feel it at all. If you can feel it, it’s too warm.”
“I can’t feel it.”
“Then that’s it. Now sit down with her, and keep her head up above her belly, and don’t let her gulp. You stop every little bit and you bring up the air.”
Ben sat down in the kitchen chair. My father laid my daughter into his arms and moved his elbow up an inch, the way you would set a tool on a bench.
“Your grandma would’ve had you spoiled rotten by now,” he told Nora, in that low road grader voice. “She’d have never set you down.”
Then he saw me in the hall. He only shook his head, once, and pointed back toward the bed.
I went. I lay down in the dark and I listened to two men who loved me feed my baby in my mother’s kitchen, and I cried so hard and so quietly that the pillow was wet on both sides. It was not the worn out kind of crying. It was the other kind.
We stayed at my father’s for three weeks and two days.
Ben drove me down to Yankton the next week for my incision check. The doctor asked what I had been doing, and I said sitting in a rocking chair, and he said to keep at it.
When his week was up he went back to the elevator, and he drove it every day, seventy five miles down before light and seventy five miles home after dark, through the last of the beans and the first of the corn. He was on the road by a quarter past four. He did the two o’clock feeding all the same, every night, and got up two hours later and went.
He spoke to his mother on the telephone during those weeks, out on the porch. I know he told her that we would not be back to stay, and that when the house on Pine Street was done we would go straight there. I know he told her she was welcome to come and see her granddaughter whenever she was ready to, and that it would be up to me whether I was.