The Apron My Mother-in-Law Handed Me
That was the consequence, if you are looking for one. No one raised a voice at her. No one told the town. Her club met the next Thursday at Donna’s as if nothing had happened. But for more than four weeks after that morning, Marge did not hold her only grandchild, and she knew exactly why, and so did seven women she had known since 1988.
The electrician finished the last week of October. We moved into the house on Pine Street on a Saturday, with my father’s truck and Ben’s two friends from the elevator, and I carried nothing but Nora.
Marge came the second Sunday in November, after church.
She was at the door at one o’clock in her church coat, with a hot dish wrapped in a bath towel and a paper sack. She stood on our new front step and she did not come in until I said to. I noticed that.
I held the screen open. She came in and set the hot dish on the counter and stood in the middle of my kitchen with her purse still on her arm, in a room where she had no list.
Nora was awake in her seat on the table. She was nearly six weeks old by then, and had found her hands. Marge looked at her from four feet away as though there were a rope across the room.
“Sit down, Marge,” I said.
She sat. She put the paper sack on the table and slid it toward me.
It was the apron. The pink roses on white. It had been washed and ironed, and folded in thirds.
“Phyllis had it,” she said. “She kept it in her purse a month and wouldn’t give it to me. She said I could have it back when I knew what to do with it.” Marge looked at her own hands. “I don’t expect you want it. But it was my mother’s, and I thought you ought to be the one to say.”
I did not touch it yet.
“I’ve got something to tell you,” she said, “and I’d be obliged if you let me get to the end of it, because I have never said it out loud and I may not get it right.”
“All right.”
“Ben was born on the ninth of October. At home, near enough. We got to the hospital in Yankton with twenty minutes to spare, and they sent me home the second day. It was a wet fall. We had three hundred acres of beans still standing and the forecast was for more rain.”
She turned her wedding ring around on her finger.
“Ray’s mother lived with us. On the fourth day she came to the bedroom door at five in the morning and she said, Marjorie, the beans won’t wait on you. And she held out my chore coat.”
Ben had come to stand in the kitchen doorway. He was very still.
“I drove the grain truck that day. I sat on a folded bath towel. I drove it eleven hours, and I went in every three to nurse him with his grandmother standing there looking at the clock. I bled through the towel. I didn’t tell anybody. I did it the next day, and the day after.”
“Mom,” Ben said.