The Crib Under My Mother’s Window

She looked at me a second longer than she needed to. “Congratulations,” she said. “You look like you need to hear that from somebody.”

I thanked her, and I walked out to my car, and I sat in that parking lot with the receipt in both hands and cried for about ten minutes.

Not sad crying. Not happy either. Just the crying that comes after you have carried something heavy a long way and finally set it down.

On the way home I did the rest of my sums. After the check there was $4,832 left in savings.

That was going to be my rent in Fort Smith, my gas, my books. It was not enough, and I would still be waiting tables on weekends, but it was enough to start.

I did not take the crib money out of savings. I took it out of the coffee can, out of that weekend’s tips, which I had not banked yet.

It felt important to me that the crib come from the same place the school did, from plates carried and tables wiped.

I stopped at the Walmart in Harrison a little after noon. I found the baby aisle and stood in front of the cribs for a long time like I was picking out a car.

There was a white wooden one, plain and sturdy, that converted to a toddler bed later. It was $189.

I picked out a firm mattress for $59 and a fitted sheet with little yellow ducks on it for nine dollars.

The girl at the register was somebody I had gone to high school with. She looked at the crib box and then at me and her eyebrows went up into her hair.

“Oh, it’s not mine,” I said, and laughed for the first time all day. “It’s my mama’s. Number six.”

“Six,” she said. “Lord have mercy. Tell her congratulations.”

“I’ll tell her,” I said.

When I got home the house was empty, which I had counted on. Daddy was at the mill until five thirty.

The kids were at school. Mama had a checkup at the clinic in Harrison and was picking up Nell and Davey from the elementary school after.

Silas and Abel rode the high school bus and would not be home until after four.

Lettie was staying late for a 4-H meeting. I had the house to myself for maybe three hours.

I put the receipt on the kitchen table, under the salt shaker shaped like a rooster, where the first person through the door would see it.

Then I dragged the crib box down the hall to my parents’ bedroom.

Their room is small. It always has been. There is the bed, with the patchwork quilt my Granny Garrison pieced the year they got married, and a dresser crowded with family pictures, and one window that looks out on the pasture and the hill beyond it.

I moved the laundry basket and the box fan and the stack of Daddy’s work boots out from under that window.

I swept, because I knew Mama would want it swept. Then I opened the box on the floor and laid out every piece in rows, the way Daddy taught me.