The Note on My Front Door

Then the crying started. Not regular crying. She would eat and scream, eat and scream, pull her legs up to her belly and go red. She broke out in a rash across her chin. Our family doctor said colic, then reflux.

At three months I changed a diaper and found streaks of blood in it. I drove her to the clinic in town without calling first. Our doctor took one look and sent us to the allergist that same week.

The allergist was a calm woman named Dr. Owens, with reading glasses on a beaded chain and a stuffed giraffe she let Ellie chew while she talked. She explained it to us slowly, twice, because I kept crying.

Cow’s milk protein allergy, she said. Ellie’s body treated the protein in milk like something to fight. The blood was from her gut being inflamed.

It was more common than people thought, and most babies grew out of it somewhere between their first and third birthday.

“Until then,” she said, “no cow’s milk, no regular formula, nothing made from milk. This formula has the protein broken down so small her body does not recognize it. It is expensive, and I am sorry about that. But it works.”

It worked in four days. The screaming stopped. The rash faded. She started sleeping four hours at a stretch and then six, and she smiled at me in the mornings like she had just met me and liked what she saw.

Darlene came to supper the Sunday after the appointment. I had the can on the counter, and she picked it up and turned it over to read the price sticker I had forgotten to peel off.

“Forty-eight dollars,” she said. “For powder.”

“It is special,” I said. “The allergist prescribed it.”

“I raised three on whole milk,” she said, “put them on it at six months, same as my mother did. Josh was the biggest of the three. Every one of them is healthy as a horse.”

“Ellie is allergic, Darlene. She had blood in her diaper.”

She set the can down. “Babies get all kinds of things. Doctors have a name for everything now, and every name comes with something to buy.”

Josh changed the subject, and I let him. That was how we handled Darlene. You did not argue with her at her table or yours. You let it go by like weather and hoped it blew somewhere else.

Over the summer it came up again and again. A joke about the fancy formula at the Fourth of July picnic. A newspaper clipping about drug companies left in Ellie’s diaper bag. A comment at Josh’s sister Amy’s birthday supper.

“Back in my day we did not have allergies,” she said that time, to the whole table. “We had mothers who did not run to the doctor every time a baby sneezed.”

Nobody answered her. Josh’s dad Ron looked at his plate. Amy looked at me with an apology in her eyes. And I passed the green beans and said nothing, because I was the daughter-in-law and that is what you do.

I should say this about Darlene too, because it is true. She drove forty minutes to the hospital in Lee’s Summit at two in the morning when Ellie was born.

She knitted her a blanket in yellow and white that took her three months.