The Nursery I Moved Into Her Room

The Eighth Night

On the eighth night I came up the hall from the kitchen with a warmed bottle and I heard furniture moving in the nursery.

It was my mother. She had Jesse by the arm, and Jesse had his laundry basket on his hip, and she was steering him out the door of that gray room like he was nine years old.

“Mama, what are you doing,” I said.

“What I should have done the first day,” she said. She did not stop moving. “Jesse’s going to Bobby Dean’s. Bobby’s got the bunk room over his shop and he already said yes, I called him an hour ago. Your brother is a grown man and he can sleep over a shop for a while.”

Jesse did not argue. He looked at me over the laundry basket, and he is not a bad brother, he is just a lost one, and he said, low, “I didn’t know she was this sick, Heather. The pictures looked, she looked fine in the pictures. I’d have never took the room if I’d known.” And I believed him, because he did look sick about it himself.

He carried his mattress and his weight bench out to his truck in two trips in the cold and he hugged me on the way out, careful, like I might break too, and he said he would come see the baby when he was not carrying plant germs. Then his taillights went down the lane.

I went into the nursery. My mother had already carried the used crib in from the barn and was wiping the winter dust off it with a rag. She had the mobile of felt stars in her other hand where she had found it in a box.

“The paint held up good,” she said, not looking at me, her voice not steady. “You did a nice job on that lamb. I always meant to tell you.”

We moved Ava in that night, the two of us. We carried the bassinet and then the concentrator, Mama taking one end of it and me the other, down the hall to the room I had painted for her. We threaded the tubing along the baseboard the way I had learned. We set the crib under the window where I had always meant it to go, with the sun coming in from the east in the morning the way I told her it would when she was still inside me and I was still painting.

When it was all set and humming, my mother did not leave. She picked my daughter up out of the bassinet, careful of the tube, cradling the little head in her broad hand the way I had not taught her, the way a body just knows, and she sat down in the rocker in the corner.

She rocked Ava in that finished nursery in the dove gray light of the lamp, and she cried without wiping it, and she said, “I’m sorry, baby girl. Your grandma is a hardheaded old woman and she is so sorry.” She was not saying it to me. She was saying it to Ava. But I was standing right there, and I took it anyway, and I kept it.