The Crib Under My Mother’s Window

I set the screwdriver down. I had practiced a lot of things to say on the drive home, and every one of them went right out of my head.

“Hope Ann,” she said.

That was all, at first. Just my name, the way she used to say it when I was little and had done something she did not know what to do with.

I stood up. My knees had gone stiff on the floor. “The school’s paid, Mama,” I said. “The whole first year. I’m not going to take that back, and I’m not going to argue about it.”

She nodded. She was not looking at me. She was looking at the crib.

“And I know you need the van,” I said. “I do. I’ll still help where I can. I’ll buy diapers. I’ll buy formula if you need it. But the school’s mine. I’ve been saving for it since I was twenty.”

“I know,” she said. Her voice cracked right down the middle. “I know, honey.”

She came in past the kids and put her hand on the rail of the crib.

She ran it along the top, slow, the way you would touch the face of somebody you love, and then her face folded up and she started to cry.

It was not the crying I had been afraid of. It was not the money.

I had braced myself all day for the money, and she did not say one word about it.

“Nobody ever bought me a crib,” she said. “Did you know that? Five babies, counting you. Nobody ever once bought me a new crib.”

I did not know that. I had never thought about it.

“You slept in a dresser drawer the first month,” she said, laughing and crying at the same time. “Your daddy took the bottom drawer out and padded it with towels. We were twenty years old. We didn’t have two nickels.”

“Then your Aunt Faye’s pack-and-play, and then everybody after you had that same pack-and-play, and I kept saying next time, next time we’ll get a real one. And then there was never a next time. There was always something else.”

She wiped her face with the back of her hand. Davey came and wrapped both arms around Mama’s leg.

Nell stood in the doorway with her mouth open, because she had never seen Mama cry in the daytime.

“I wanted one by the window,” Mama said. “That’s all. That’s a silly thing for a grown woman to want. A crib by the window, where the baby could see the light.”

“It’s not silly,” I said.

We sat down on the edge of the bed together, on Granny’s quilt, and for a while neither of us said anything.

Davey climbed up in Mama’s lap, what was left of it. Nell sat on the floor and spun the screwdriver like a top.

“We shouldn’t have done it like that,” Mama said finally. “At the table. In front of everybody. That was your daddy’s idea and I let him, because I was scared, and because you always say yes.”

“I know I do,” I said.

“That’s on us,” she said. “That’s not on you. You’ve been saying yes since you were nine. You were changing Abel’s diapers at ten.”