The Nursery I Moved Into Her Room

The Towel on the Bar

I did not get started. That is the thing I keep coming back to. I did not scream, I did not cry, I did not say the words that were sitting right there at the back of my teeth.

I turned around and looked at my mother in the hallway and I felt the whole long month in the hospital drain out of me and leave me very quiet.

“Where is the crib,” I said.

“It’s in the barn, under a tarp. It’s fine. Nothing’s hurt.”

“Why is it in the barn.”

Mama folded the dish towel in half and then in half again. “Jesse needed a place. He lost the apartment in town after they let him go at the tire shop. He’s paying me a hundred a month, which is more than you two pay, and he helps with the wood.” She said it fast, like she had practiced it at the sink.

“He’s renting the nursery,” I said. I was not asking. I was just trying to get the shape of it into words so I could believe it.

“It’s a room,” she said. “It was a room before you painted it. The baby can sleep in with you and Cody. Babies don’t need their own room. You didn’t have your own room till you were two.”

Cody came down the hall then with the car seat in both hands, and Ava made the small catlike sound she made when the light changed, and all three of us looked at her.

She was so little. People who have not held a four pound baby do not know how little that is. Her fist was the size of a strawberry. The cannula ran from her nose over her ears and down to the tank on my shoulder, and the clip on her foot glowed red through the blanket.

“Mama,” I said. “She comes home on oxygen. She has to be on the monitor all night. It alarms. You cannot have that machine running in a room with a grown man working nights sleeping the other half of the day.”

Mama looked at the glowing red clip on Ava’s foot and something moved in her face, but it closed again.

“Then she’ll be fine in with you,” she said. “I’ll get Jesse to carry your dresser out to make room.”