The Crib Under My Mother’s Window

I had helped him put together Davey’s bed when he came out of the pack-and-play, and Nell’s before that.

He was the one who taught me to read the whole instruction sheet before touching a single screw, and to sort the hardware into a muffin tin so nothing rolled under the bed.

“Most folks get in a hurry,” he had told me, back when I was maybe eleven. “Then they’ve got a crooked thing and a leftover bolt and no idea where it went. Slow is fast, Hope.”

So I went slow. I put on a podcast and turned it off again.

I liked the quiet better, with the wind in the cedar trees and a truck on the county road now and then.

There is a moment, putting a crib together, when it stops being a pile of white boards and becomes a place where somebody is going to sleep.

For me it was when I set the mattress support in at the right height and saw how small the space inside was.

That baby was going to be that small. A whole person, small enough to fit in there with room to spare.

My brother or my sister. I sat back on my heels and had to wipe my eyes on the sleeve of my T-shirt.

The light had gone long by the time I was down to the last side.

It was late afternoon and it came in through that one window and lay across the quilt and the floor and the open crib box, warm and slanted like spring light is.

I was kneeling on the floor in my gray T-shirt and jeans, with my hair pulled back in a ponytail to keep it out of my face, tightening a bolt with a screwdriver, when I heard the front door.

Then I heard little feet in the kitchen. Then nothing. Then Nell’s voice, loud and slow, reading the way she has just learned to read big words. “Tuition. And. Fees. Paid. In. Full.”

Mama said something I could not make out. Then there were more little feet, coming down the hall fast, and they stopped short at the bedroom door.

Nell and Davey peeked in at the doorframe, side by side, like two baby owls.

Nell is nine. Davey is six. Davey’s eyes went from me to the crib and back to me.

“Is that for our baby?” he whispered.

“It sure is,” I said. “Want to help me with the last bolt?”

He did not move, because he had heard Mama coming, and so had I. Mama was slower these days.

She came down the hall with one hand on the wall, and she stopped in the doorway beside the two of them.

She had set her purse down in the kitchen, and one hand went to Davey’s shoulder.

She was wearing her flowered top, the one she wears to the doctor because it is soft, and her brown hair was pulled back the way she wears it on clinic days.

She looked at the crib. She looked at the window, and the swept floor, and the box, and me on my knees.

And she put her hand over her heart, the way she does in church during the slow songs.