The Names on the Registry List

What I knew about Patty

Ben’s dad, Rick, left in the fall of last year. There was no other woman that anybody knew of, and no big fight.

He just told Patty at supper one night that he had been unhappy for a long time, and he moved into an apartment in Salina by Thanksgiving.

Patty kept the house in Concordia. Rick kept the pickup, the boat and most of the savings, because Patty did not want to fight over money in front of her sons.

She went from part time to full time at the front desk of a dental office, answering phones and scheduling cleanings.

She never complained to me, not once. When I asked how she was, she said “Oh, I’m fine, honey, I’ve got my shows and my sewing.”

But I had seen her checkbook open on the counter once, and I had seen her stand in the grocery aisle and put back a pack of pork chops.

I loved her. I want that on the record before I tell the rest of it. Patty Lowe taught me how to can tomatoes, and she drove forty minutes in a snowstorm to bring Ben soup when he had pneumonia.

She was never cruel to me. Not until that Sunday, and even then I am not sure cruel is the right word.

Saturday night

The shower was set for a Sunday afternoon in October, at my mother’s farmhouse eleven miles north of town. My mom, Sue Gerdes, had been planning it since June.

She borrowed forty folding chairs from the township hall, tied pastel balloons to every lamp, and ordered a sheet cake from the grocery store bakery with pale green frosting for the gift table by the window.

On Saturday night I printed the registry. I wanted a head start on the thank-you notes, so I pulled up the list of everything that had been bought and printed it with the buyer’s name next to each item.

There were thirty-one items purchased online. Every one of them had shipped to Patty’s address.

Every one of them had been bought by somebody in Ben’s family who lived out of state and could not drive to a Sunday afternoon shower in north-central Kansas.

Amanda in Omaha. Ben’s uncle Jim and aunt Carol in Denver. Ben’s cousin Mark Halvorsen in Springfield, Missouri, who bought the crib mattress.

Ben’s great-aunt Ida Lowe, eighty-six years old, in Tulsa, the widow of his grandpa’s brother, who had bought the most expensive thing on the whole registry: a solid oak rocking chair.

I sat at our kitchen table and read the names and cried a little, because I am pregnant and because thirty-one people who barely knew me had sent things for a baby they had never met.

Then I folded the list in half and put it in my purse.

Sunday morning

Patty pulled into my mother’s driveway at a quarter to one with her Buick riding low.

She had the back seat and the trunk both packed to the ceiling. I went out to help her carry, and she shooed me off.

“You are not lifting one thing in your condition,” she said. “Go sit.”

So I sat in the armchair by the window in the cream sweater dress my mother had bought me, the only thing that still fit, and watched her carry in box after box, wrapped in yellow and green and white paper, and stack them on the wooden table my dad had set up by the window.

She was smiling. She looked better than I had seen her look in a year.

My mother came through from the kitchen with a stack of paper plates and stopped. “Patty, good heavens,” she said. “Did you buy out the store?”

Patty laughed and waved her hand. “Oh, I may have gone a little overboard,” she said. “It’s my first grandbaby. What are you going to do.”

I did not understand it yet. I thought she meant she had gone overboard keeping things nice. Then I got up to get a glass of water and passed the table, and I saw the tags.

Every box had the same small white tag. Every tag said “Love, Grandma Patty.”