The Diaper Box at the River Picnic

I read my sister’s post sitting on the tailgate of Tyler’s truck on the third level of the parking deck at Arkansas Children’s, with a breast pump bag in my lap and the early summer heat coming up off the concrete.

It was a picture of her couch. The brown one with the blanket folded over the arm, the one I had slept on for 61 nights.

She had put a little lamp in the corner of the shot so it looked warm.

“Opening my home to family these last two months,” she wrote. “When your people need you, you show up. That’s what sisters do.”

Under it were forty-one likes and a row of hearts, and one of the hearts was from our mother.

Bo had been home for two weeks by then. We had only driven back down to Little Rock for his first follow-up with the eye doctor, and I had stepped out to the truck to pump while Tyler walked him around the lobby.

Two days before that post, Nikki had sent me a text. It said, “Hey, no rush at all, but I added it up and the couch came to $1,525. Whenever y’all can.” Then a heart. Then nothing else.

I sat there on the tailgate and read the post three times. I did not cry, and I did not call her. I put the phone face down on the pump bag and watched a hospital helicopter come in low over the trees, the way they did four or five times a day.

When Tyler came out with Bo in the car seat, he looked at my face and asked what happened. I handed him the phone.

He read it, and his jaw did the thing it does when a fan motor goes out in August and he knows exactly what it is going to cost.

“I’ll pay her tomorrow,” he said. “I’ll pull it out of the truck fund.” I said no. We had $212 in the truck fund, and the truck needed tires, and the hospital had already sent the first statement for our part of the bill.

“Then I’ll call her,” he said. I told him I would handle my sister. He looked at me a long minute, then nodded and clicked Bo’s seat into the base.

Tyler does not argue with me about my family, and I do not argue with him about chickens.

I need to tell you how we got to that couch, because the couch was not the whole story, and I am not going to pretend my sister was a monster.

She was not. She was broke, and she was proud, and so was I.

Bo came eleven weeks early, at twenty-nine weeks, on a Saturday night in April. I had been cutting hair that afternoon at the shop on the square in Ozark, and my back had hurt all day, and I thought it was standing. It was not standing.

The hospital in Clarksville sent us on by ambulance. By the time Tyler caught up to us on I-40 they had already decided Bo needed the NICU at Arkansas Children’s, and that was two hours from our house on a good day with no trucks.

He weighed two pounds and nine ounces. He was red and see-through and smaller than the hand Tyler held out over him, and he had a breathing mask strapped over his whole little face and a tube in his nose for feeding.