Six Cribs in My Living Room

“And there’s a tax lien,” Kristy said. “From the payroll taxes for the girls who work for her, Kayla and Amber. She fell behind last spring, when Dad was in the hospital. She kept thinking she could catch up. She kept thinking one more month.”

“She deposited everybody’s December checks on Monday,” Kristy said. “And on Tuesday the government took the account. All of it. It froze, and it was gone. She couldn’t pay Kayla and Amber on Friday. She couldn’t pay the electric. She couldn’t face anybody, so she wrote that note and locked the door.”

Lauren came back in with the diaper bag and snow in her hair and set it down quietly by the stairs.

She looked at me, and I looked at her, and neither of us said anything.

“She took my six hundred and forty too,” Kristy said. “She made me pay like everybody else. She always did. She said if she treated me different, people would know something was wrong. I paid my own mother and she knew the whole time that she was underwater.”

That was when Kristy really cried. She put both hands over her face and stood in my front entry and cried the way you cry when you have been holding it for two days and somebody finally let you inside where it is warm.

I put Mia down on the blanket next to Owen, who was lying on it by the radiator chewing on his stuffed cow.

Then I went and stood next to Kristy and put my hand on her back and let her cry.

I did not say it was okay. It was not okay. But she was not the one who did it.

“I came here first on purpose,” Kristy said, when she could talk again. She wiped her face with her coat sleeve. “I sat in my car down the street for twenty minutes waiting for your car to come home. I wanted to be the first one. I wanted everybody to know I was the first one.”

“Kristy, you didn’t have to do that,” I said.

“Yes, I did,” she said. “People are going to find out whose baby you took first. I want them to. I’m going to tell them myself. I want every family that got that note to know that my mother’s granddaughter is in your living room because you said yes.”

I did not want that. I want to be honest about that. I did not want my living room to be a lesson about Pam.

I wanted it to be a place where six babies were warm and fed while their mothers went to work. But it was not my story to stop her from telling.

“I’m going to work now,” Kristy said. “I’ll be back at five fifteen. Thank you.” She looked at Mia on the blanket, and then she turned and went down my four steps into the snow, and I watched her sit in her car with the engine running for a long time before she drove off.

That was the first morning.

Amy brought her son, Brody, at a quarter to eight, apologizing the whole way up the steps. Lauren’s Wyatt and Stephanie’s twins were already there.

That made six. Six white cribs, six babies, and a living room that smelled like baby wipes and coffee and the salt Nate had tracked in.

I slept upstairs from nine until two, the way night nurses sleep, with a fan running for the noise and a towel over the window.