The Nursery I Moved Into Her Room

I Moved Into Her Room

My mother sleeps in the big front bedroom, the one with the good light and the floral spread and the cedar chest at the foot of the bed that was her mother’s.

It is the best room in the house. It has two windows and a register right over the furnace trunk so it is the warmest room by ten degrees. It has space along the wall where a dresser used to be before she sold it. It is quiet, down at the far end from the hall, away from the kitchen and the back door and the road.

It was, I realized, the only room in the house a baby on oxygen could safely sleep.

Cody brought the concentrator in from the trunk. It is about the size of a two drawer file cabinet and it weighs a good forty pounds and it hums like a window fan when it runs. He set it in the corner of Mama’s room by the register. I threaded the fifty feet of tubing along the baseboard so nothing would kink.

I carried the bassinet in, the little rolling one from the hospital, and set it beside Mama’s bed on the side away from the window so no draft would reach the baby. I set the portable tank in its stand within reach. I clipped the oximeter to Ava’s foot and turned it on and watched the number climb to ninety seven and hold.

Then I plugged in the concentrator and turned the dial to an eighth of a liter, and it came on with its soft steady hum, and I laid my daughter down in that bassinet in the warmest, quietest, best room in my mother’s house.

Mama stood in the doorway the whole time. She did not say one word. She had her arms crossed over the dish towel she was still holding.

“Where am I supposed to sleep,” she finally said.

“Jesse’s got a mattress,” I said. “In the nursery. It’s a room. It was a room before I painted it.”

I did not say it mean. I said it the way you lay a card down when you both know it is the only card left. She heard her own words come back at her and her mouth went tight and she turned and walked up the hall.

Cody looked at me. He had worked a ten hour night and he had an eight hour night coming and his eyes were red at the rims. He is not a man for speeches. He just said, “You sure,” and I said, “I’m sure,” and he kissed the top of Ava’s head where the soft spot pulsed, and he went to lie down for three hours before his shift.