The Tiny Caps I Knit for the Nursery

“We keep it on the shelf in the back room. Every cap that comes in, from you or the church circles or the lady in Pretty Prairie who does the crocheted ones, goes through the laundry and then into the basket. When a baby comes in, we pick a cap for them. It’s the first thing. Before the blanket, before the name band. Somebody checks the size and picks one.”

“I know that part.”

“On Sunday night I was the one on shift. I was at the nursing station when the transport came in and I was setting up the bed. The baby they brought was small, smaller than most of what we get now, because the Wichita unit takes the really early ones. She’d been wearing a cap from their hospital, and it was a little damp from the ride, so I took it off and went to the basket.”

She breathed in.

“I always pick from the top. I don’t know why. The one on top was a cream one with a little green in it. It was a peanut size. It looked soft. I put it on her.”

I held on to the cap.

“I didn’t know her name was Josie Voss until I read the chart in the morning. And I didn’t know who her people were. Then I read the next line, the grandparents’ names, because we write down who’s allowed to visit.”

She looked at me over the top of her glasses.

“It said Marcella Reed.”

I said nothing at all.

“I stood there with that chart for a good five minutes,” Rosa said. “I’ve been telling parents about the cap lady for twenty-four years. When a mother asks where the caps come from, I say, ‘A woman in Haven makes them. I’ve never met her.’ I have said that sentence to hundreds of families. I have said it so often that I’m not sure I believed it was a real person.”

“Rosa,” I said.

“And it’s you. I’ve been nodding at you in this hallway for twenty-four years. You leave the box with Bev and you go.”

“That is the arrangement,” I said.

“It’s a terrible arrangement,” Rosa said. She said it kindly. “I’m sorry. I wanted to say thank you for a long time, and you never stand still long enough.”

That was when I sat down. There is a wooden bench in that hallway, under a picture of a barn at sunset that I have always privately thought was a poor barn. I sat on it with the cap in my lap and the box on the radiator and I stayed there.

I am not a woman who sees signs in every cloud. Gene says I am the least mystical person in the county, and I still do not know how any of it works.

I only know that I knit that cap in August, in the heat, with the window unit rattling, before Jenna’s blood pressure went up, before anyone knew, and that I said my prayer over it the same as every other.