The Crib Under My Mother’s Window

She dried the same plate for a long time. “Your daddy looked,” she said. “He looked hard. The credit union won’t loan us any more with the hours cut. We still owe on the roof.”

That night I lay in the bottom bunk and listened to Lettie breathe above me and Nell turn over in the little bed under the window, and I did my sums on the ceiling in the dark.

I could see the shape of what Daddy wanted. A good used minivan, eight seats, maybe a few years old, would run twelve or fourteen thousand dollars. My savings would buy it almost to the penny.

Then what? Then I would wait tables another year and save again, and next Easter there would be something else.

A roof, a transmission, braces for Abel, a fridge. There is always something in a house with six children and one paycheck.

The letter from Fort Smith said I had to confirm my seat by May, and that the program might not hold a seat for anybody who deferred.

I had read that line so many times I could have said it in my sleep.

Around midnight I got up for water and saw the light on in the kitchen.

Mama was at the table in her robe with the bill drawer pulled out and a calculator, and she was crying without making any sound.

I stood in the hall where she could not see me. She punched in numbers, cleared them, and punched them in again, like they might come out different if she asked nicer. Then she put her face in her hands.

I want to be fair to her, because she deserves fairness. My mother was not greedy.

She was forty-four years old and pregnant and scared, and she had been scared about money every single day of my life.

My daddy was not greedy either. He had worked at that sawmill since he was nineteen, stacking hardwood and running the edger, and he had two fingers on his left hand that did not bend right anymore because of it.

They were not bad people. They were tired people who had leaned on me so long they forgot I was standing up on my own two feet.

I went out to the porch and sat on the step in my socks. The air smelled like rain coming and cut grass. Somebody’s dog was barking down toward the creek.

Out by the shed, in the yard light, I could see the shape of the old pack-and-play leaned against the wall.

Every one of us had slept in that thing, everybody but Silas. One side had not latched right since Davey.

Abel had asked where the baby would sleep, and Mama had laughed and said we’d figure it out. I knew what that meant.

It meant the pack-and-play with the bad latch, propped shut with a brick, at the foot of their bed.

I sat there a long time. And sometime after one in the morning, I stopped thinking about the van and started thinking about the baby.

I could not give them fourteen thousand dollars. If I did, I would never leave that house, and I knew it as surely as I knew my own name.