Six Cribs in My Living Room

Through the front window I could see them both in my living room, kneeling on the floor, snapping the legs of the last two white cribs into place.

Nate had already left for the shed. He had shoveled the steps before he went and put down salt, and I could see the boot prints where he had gone back and forth with the bucket twice. He had left the front door unlocked for me.

I had just come in and set my bag down by the stairs when I heard a car door outside. I opened the front door, and the cold came in, and the snow came in, and there was Kristy Kauffman coming up my four concrete steps with her baby in her arms.

Mia was in a pink snowsuit and a pink knit hat, the puffy kind with the mittens sewn onto the sleeves. Her face was the only part of her showing.

Kristy wore a dark green winter coat with a fur-trimmed hood and tan boots, and she held Mia tight against her chest.

She was looking around at the snow with her mouth open, the way babies do, like the sky was doing something just for her.

Kristy was crying. Not loudly. Just steadily, the tears running down while she climbed the steps like she did not notice them. She stopped at the top, on the little landing, and looked past me into the living room at the cribs and Lauren and Stephanie, and she did not say anything.

She was the first baby dropped off. Of all the babies in all of those families, the first one through my door that Monday morning was Pam Kauffman’s granddaughter.

I reached out and took Mia from her. I did not say a word about whose granddaughter she was. I did not say a word about the money, or the note, or the lunch menu, or the parking lot.

I just took that baby in her pink snowsuit and held her against my scrubs.

Mia looked up at me and grabbed the collar of my top with one sewn-on mitten. She knew me.

She had been in the next crib over from Owen for eight months at her grandmother’s. She knew my face.

“Her bag’s in the car,” Kristy said. “I’ll get it. I have her sheet. I wrote everything down.” Her voice cracked on the last word. She stood there on my landing with snow collecting on her shoulders and did not go get the bag.

“Come in out of the cold,” I said. “Lauren will get the bag.”

Lauren was already up and past us and down the steps in her socks before I finished the sentence.

Kristy came in and stood in the little front entry, dripping, and looked at the six white cribs and the couch pushed against the wall.

“I didn’t know,” she said. “Jenna, I swear to you before God, I did not know any of it until Saturday.”

“My dad’s surgery,” Kristy said. “The bypass. His insurance from the mill ran out when he couldn’t go back to work. They tried to get him on disability and it’s taking forever. The bills from Hershey are over a hundred thousand dollars. She never told me. She never told anybody.”

Stephanie had stopped working on the crib. She was kneeling on the floor with a crib leg in her hand, listening.