The Tiny Caps I Knit for the Nursery
“Mom,” she said. “Is that yours?”
I said it was.
“I thought it was one of the nursery’s,” she said. “I’ve been looking at her face for two days. I never looked at the hat.”
That made two of us, I told her, and I had made it.
“The one she’s wearing is yours?”
“It’s the last of the Hutchinson yarn,” I said. “I made it in August.”
Nobody said anything then. The heating lamp hummed. Out in the hall, a floor machine started up, and a long way off a telephone rang and somebody answered it.
Jenna’s eyes filled. She did not cry out loud. She is not that kind of girl, and she gets it from me. She just sat there, looking at the cap.
I put my hand on Josie’s back. My hand covered the whole of it, from her shoulders to her bottom, the same as it had in Wichita, but warmer now, because she was a little bigger and a little pinker. She stirred. She made a sound like a hinge. And then she went back to sleep under the lamp, with my cap on her head and her mother in the chair and her grandmother standing very still.
That was all. I did not say a thing. Rosa stood by the door with the box on her hip and she did not say anything either.
There is not much more to tell, but I’ll tell you the rest, because I think you will want to know how it came out.
Josie stayed in that nursery for just over five more weeks. She was a slow, serious eater at first. She would take an ounce and then fall asleep in the middle of a swallow, like Gene after Sunday dinner. Then one afternoon she finished a whole bottle in twenty minutes, and the nurses cheered as if she had won the county fair.
She gained an ounce, then two. By the end of October they took out the feeding tube. A week after that, they let her sleep in an open crib instead of the bassinet with the lamp.
I came every day. The nurses did not mind. I sat in that rocking chair, the one that has been there since before the renovation, and I held her for an hour at a time while Jenna napped in the family room down the hall.
I brought my knitting. I did not knit a cap. Josie did not need one. She had one, and the nurses had a drawer of them. I knit a little yellow sweater with a pattern from the library, in a bulky yarn that did not match anything I own, and it came out too big. She wears it now and will for a good while.
In the meantime Rosa and I got to know each other, which was long overdue. She is a widow. She has two grown sons, one in Wichita and one in Colorado, and a sister in Texas she does not speak to about politics. She keeps a jar of butterscotch candies in her locker and she sneaks them to the grandfathers.