The Notice After the Last Beans

The box

Two days before Thanksgiving, I found out I was pregnant.

I took the test in Paul’s upstairs bathroom at six in the morning and sat on the edge of the tub for ten minutes before I could stand up.

I went out to the shop in my robe and my chore coat and boots and told Nate. He dropped a socket wrench on the concrete and picked me up off the floor.

“In the old house,” he kept saying. “In a house with a real furnace.”

We told Paul at dinner. He set his fork down and blew his nose and said Margaret would have liked this very much.

We decided to tell Nate’s folks at Christmas. But I ran into Judy at the grocery store in Princeton the second week of December, in the canned goods aisle, and I could not keep it in.

She hugged me right there by the green beans. She held on for a long time.

“Does Vern know?” she asked.

“Not yet. Nate wants to tell him.”

“Let him,” Judy said. “Let Nate tell him.”

Three days later, there was a cardboard box on Paul’s porch when I came in from the mailbox. It had been taped shut with masking tape and it had my name on top in Judy’s handwriting.

I carried it in and set it on the kitchen table and opened it.

Inside was a crib quilt Judy had made out of feed sack prints, folded in tissue paper. Under it was a baby book with Nate’s name on the front, half filled in.

And under that, in the very bottom, wrapped in a dish towel, was a pair of little white leather baby shoes.

The toes were scuffed nearly through. The laces were gray with age. There was a slip of paper tucked inside one of them.

It said, in Judy’s handwriting: He took his first steps in these in the machine shed, walking from me to Vern. Vern caught him. I have kept them thirty three years for this.

I sat at Paul’s kitchen table and held those little shoes in my two hands and cried until Nate came in from the shop and found me.

He picked one up. It sat in the palm of his hand like a bird.

“I don’t remember that,” he said.

“Your dad does,” I said. “Your mom says he caught you.”

Nate looked at that shoe for a long time. He set it down on the table very carefully, next to the other one.

“I’m going to go tell him,” he said.

He walked across the road that evening and was gone two hours. When he came back his eyes were red and he said they had sat in the shop and not said much, but his dad had shaken his hand and then pulled him in and held on.

That was all he would tell me. That was enough.