The Crib Under My Mother’s Window

Every two weeks I took the can to the bank in Harrison and put it all in a savings account in my own name.

Some weeks it was sixty dollars. Some weeks, in the summer when the lake people came through, it was three hundred.

It added up the way water fills a stock tank, slow and then all at once.

By that Easter it was $14,212. I knew the number to the dollar because I checked it on my phone in the walk-in cooler at work the way some girls check on a boyfriend.

I wanted to be a dental hygienist. I had wanted it since I was fifteen and a hygienist named Mrs. Abbott cleaned my teeth for free at a school clinic day and talked to me the whole time like I was somebody worth talking to.

She told me hygienists in Arkansas could make a real living, with regular hours and no Saturday nights.

To a girl who had grown up watching her daddy come home from the sawmill with his hands shaking, regular hours sounded like heaven.

The program I wanted was at the college in Fort Smith, about two and a half hours south and west of us.

It is a hard program to get into. I applied twice. The second time, in March, the letter said yes.

I had shown that letter to everybody at that Easter table. Mama had cried and hugged me.

Daddy had read it twice, folded it, and handed it back to me without a word, which in our house is about as close as he comes to a speech.

So they knew. That was the part that sat in my chest like a stone.

They knew exactly what the money was for, and they had talked it over anyway, just the two of them, and decided it was theirs to spend.

I did not yell at that table. I have never been a yeller, and I was not going to start on Easter in front of five kids who were watching me like a television.

“Let me sleep on it,” I said.

Daddy nodded like that settled it. In his mind I think it did. I had slept on things before, and I always woke up with the answer they wanted.

Mama got up to cut the coconut cake. Davey asked if the baby could be a girl. Abel said there were already too many girls.

Everybody laughed, and the table filled back up with noise, and I sat there with my hands in my lap.

Silas caught my eye across the table. He did not say anything.

He just shook his head, very slightly, the way you do when you see somebody about to get stepped on and you cannot reach them in time.

After dinner I washed the dishes because I always wash the dishes. Mama dried.

She hummed a little, the old hymn she always hums when she is nervous, and she bumped her hip against mine once, like we were in this together.

“I know it’s a lot to ask,” she said finally, without looking at me. “I know it is, honey. I wouldn’t ask if there was another way.”

“Was there another way?” I asked. I asked it gently. I wanted to know.