The Baby Sister I Prayed Forty Years For
That evening, with the supper dishes done and Fern gone to her motel with a plate for the road, I went up to the spare room and opened the cedar chest at the foot of the bed.
I had kept the coat.
I do not know why. It was threadbare and far too small by the time I left the Abbotts’ in 1976, and Inga would have burned it. But I wrapped it in a pillowcase and kept it in the bottom of that chest, and once a year, on August ninth, I took it out and put my thumb on the place at the collar where the top button should have been. Three buttons and a ragged circle of thread.
I carried the coat downstairs. Janet was waiting in the kitchen with her tin and the sewing basket Karla had set out. Nothing in the basket was strong enough for brown wool. Arlis went out to his workbench and came back with a spool of waxed carpet thread, black, the kind he sews tarps with, and a needle as long as my finger.
“I don’t know that I can do it,” Janet said, holding the button. “My hands shake.”
“Mine shake worse,” I said. “We’ll do it together.”
We sat at the kitchen table with the coat spread between us under the yellow light. I threaded the needle, because I still can, and she held the button, and the two of us bent our gray heads over a collar and sewed a black wool button back onto a brown coat, sixty years late. She pushed it through. I pulled it tight. I tied the knot with my teeth, the way Inga showed me.
“There,” Janet said.
I laid my palm over it. It was still warm from her pocket.
“You held it,” I said.
“I held it.”
“Until I came.”
“You came,” she said.
Janet stayed three nights that first visit, in Karla’s old room, and I did not sleep a full hour of any of them. I kept getting up to stand in the hall and listen to her breathe. Arlis found me at it on the second night and led me back to bed without a word.
On the last evening Janet sat on the edge of the guest bed in her slippers and asked me the thing I had been hoping and dreading. “Noreen. What was Mama like?”
And I told her. I told her until two in the morning. The way Mama sang alto, a little flat on the high notes, with her chin up as if daring the organist. The way she used to hold my face in both her hands and say, “You are my sturdy girl. You’ll mind your sister.” I told Janet that as a baby she had sat on the kitchen floor with a spoon and a pot lid, drumming like a marching band.
“Her name was Velma,” I said, when she asked.
“Velma,” said my sister, and said it again, tasting it.
I knelt by my own bed at eleven, as I have every night since 1986, and folded my hands, and opened my mouth to say the words. And there was nothing left in them. Forty years of the same sentence, and the one thing it asked for was asleep on the other side of the wall.
I stayed on my knees a good while, in the light from the hall. I did not say anything. I listened to her breathe through the plaster.
“Done?” Arlis asked behind me, half asleep.
“For tonight,” I said.