The Names on the Registry List

Fifteen through thirty

I will not list every box, though I could. I still have the paper.

Fifteen through thirty were bottles and burp cloths, a swing, a play mat, a stack of board books, two sleep sacks, a nail clipper set, a white noise machine, a small wooden toy barn from an uncle in Kearney, Nebraska, and a box of the good diapers from a second cousin I had met exactly once at a funeral.

Thirty-one names. Six states. Some of those people had never laid eyes on me.

Some of them were Rick’s side of the family, and they knew good and well that Rick had left Patty, and they had sent their gifts to her house anyway, because she was the grandmother and that was where the baby’s things should go.

Every one of them had trusted her with it.

Somewhere around box twenty, my phone buzzed on the end table. I turned it over. It was Ben. “What? Coming in when we finish this round. Love you.” I put the phone back down.

Around box twenty-five, Patty stopped looking at me. She looked at the floor, or at the window, or at the stack of wrapped boxes getting shorter.

Her hands kept moving. She kept handing me the next one. She never once walked away from that table.

I think about that now. She could have gone to the bathroom and stayed there. She could have gotten in her Buick and driven home.

She stood there for thirty boxes while forty women watched her, and she handed me every single one.

Box thirty-one

The last box was the biggest. It was the size of a dishwasher, wrapped in plain white paper with a pale yellow ribbon, and Patty had to slide it across the carpet to my chair because she could not lift it.

The tag said “Love, Grandma Patty.”

I did not need the list for that one. I knew what it was. I knew who had bought it.

But I looked down anyway, because I had looked down for the other thirty and it would have been wrong to stop now.

“Ida Lowe,” I started to say. “In Tulsa.”

And Patty said, “Kristen. Wait.”

What Patty said

Every head in that room turned. Patty was standing by the empty table with her hands at her sides, and she was crying, not loud, just steady, the way you cry when you have been holding it for a long time.

“That one’s Ida’s,” she said. “It’s the rocker. It’s all of theirs. Every box on that table. I didn’t buy one thing in that pile. Not one.”

Nobody said anything. My aunt Barb put the pen down.

“I didn’t have it,” Patty said. “I’ve got two hundred and twelve dollars in my checking account until the fifteenth, and the furnace went out in September. I went to the store to buy a high chair and I couldn’t. I stood in the aisle and I couldn’t.”

She looked over at my mother in the doorway.

“Sue’s throwing the shower. Sue’s buying the cake. Sue bought the crib, and the dresser, and the changing table, and I know she did, because Kristen told me. I was going to be the grandma who gave a package of washcloths.”

She wiped her face with the back of her hand.

“I just couldn’t be the one who gave the least,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, honey. I’m sorry to all of you.”

Then she turned and walked into the kitchen, past my mother, and I heard the water run in the sink.