The Crib Under My Mother’s Window

She looked at me then, really looked, and I saw something in her face I had not seen there before.

I think it was the first time my mother ever looked at me like I was a grown woman instead of a spare pair of hands.

“I’m proud of you,” she said. “I’m scared to death about the van, and I’m proud of you. I’m going to have to be both for a while.”

“That’s fair,” I said, and she laughed, and blew her nose on a tissue from the dresser.

There was one more thing in my bag. I had almost not brought it.

I had gotten it out of the cedar chest that morning before I left, when the house was still dark, and I had driven it all the way to Fort Smith and back without knowing why.

It was my baby blanket. A little yellow crocheted blanket with a scalloped edge, gone soft as flannel with washing.

Mama had made it when she was pregnant with me, at twenty, sitting up nights at the kitchen table in a rented trailer.

I unfolded it and laid it over the rail of the crib.

Then I thought better of it and tucked it in, folded at the foot of the mattress, square and neat, the way you fold a flag.

Mama made a sound I will never forget, like something let go in her chest.

“You kept that,” she said.

“You made it,” I said. “Of course I kept it.”

She reached out and touched the scalloped edge with one finger. “I learned that stitch off a library book,” she said. “I had to undo the first row eleven times.”

Davey wanted to know if the baby would know it was my blanket. Mama said babies know everything, they just can’t tell you.

Nell said that did not make any sense. Mama said most true things don’t, and Nell thought about that very hard.

Silas and Abel came in off the bus a little after four, and Lettie after five, and every one of them walked through the kitchen and read the receipt under the rooster shaker before they found us in the bedroom.

Silas stood in the doorway for a long time. Then he came over and put his hand on the back of my neck and squeezed it once, which is about as close as a seventeen-year-old boy will come to hugging his sister.

“Good,” he said quietly. “Good for you.”

Abel walked all the way around the crib and checked the rails, the way Daddy would. “This is the one that turns into a bed,” he said. “Smart.”

Lettie did not say anything at all. She came and sat next to me on the quilt and leaned her head on my shoulder, and I knew she was watching, and I knew she had seen. That was the part that mattered most to me.

Daddy got home at five forty. We heard his truck on the gravel and the door slam, and every one of us went quiet, even Davey.

He came in through the kitchen, and he stopped. I knew exactly where he was standing.