The Baby Sister I Prayed Forty Years For

Our father had left us the winter before. He did not leave a note and he did not leave an address. He left a pickup with a bad clutch and the rent unpaid. I was nine years old. My sister Marcella was two. We had been living on what the neighbor women carried over in casserole dishes, and when Mama died the casserole women had a hard talk in the church kitchen and decided it was a matter for the county.

The county sent Mrs. Kasper.

I have thought a great deal about Mrs. Hilda Kasper in my life, and not always kindly. She was a tall, tired woman in a navy coat and a small-brimmed hat, and she drove a green Plymouth that smelled of coffee. She called me “dear” and my sister “the little one,” and she sat down at our kitchen table on a gray Wednesday in November and told me there was a farm family out in the hills with a spare bedroom, and a family in town with a porch swing and no children, and that the welfare office had room for each of us in one place but not both.

“Can’t she come with me?” I said.

“They have a bed for one, dear.”

“I’ll sleep on the floor. I’ll sleep in the barn. I’ll sleep standing up.”

“It isn’t the bed,” Mrs. Kasper said, and she looked at the oilcloth on the table when she said it. “It’s what the house can feed, and what the house can bear. I’m so sorry.”

I was nine, not stupid. I understood that a grown woman had just said sorry to me, and that grown women do not say it when there is anything left to be done.

Marcella had a cold that week. She smelled of Vicks and warm milk and the inside of my mother’s coat. She would not be put down. I carried her out to the Plymouth on my hip, and she rode in my lap with her face in my neck, and every time the car turned a corner her arms tightened.

Mrs. Kasper took us to the house with the porch swing first. It was a white house on a corner, very neat, with the yellow light on over the door at three in the afternoon. A woman stood on the porch twisting her apron in both fists. She had a kind, frightened face. I would have liked to hate her. It would have been easier.

Marcella would not let go of my neck. Mrs. Kasper tried, gently. My sister screamed, the high thin scream of a child who has been picked up by too many hands in one month, and then I did the only thing I could think of.

I had a brown wool coat that fall, a hand-me-down from a cousin, with four black buttons the size of nickels. I took the top one between my fingers and pulled until the thread gave way. I pushed it into my sister’s fist and closed her fingers over it with mine.

“Hold this,” I said. “Hold this until I come.”

She looked at it. She looked at me. And she stopped screaming.

She stopped crying to hold on to something. She gripped that button as if it were the whole of me, and when Mrs. Kasper lifted her out of my arms she went quietly, with her fist against her chest.