The Diaper Box at the River Picnic

Some days I made an ounce. Some days I made a teaspoon, and I cried over the teaspoon.

Tyler drove down every day he was off and some days he wasn’t. He is a technician for a man who runs six broiler houses outside Ozark, and when you have that many birds in that many houses, somebody has to be close enough to come running when a fan or a feeder line or a generator quits.

Birds do not wait. If the fans go down on a hot afternoon in a full house you can lose thousands in an hour, and that is somebody’s whole year.

So Tyler slept at our house three or four nights a week with his phone on loud, and the other nights he made the two hours to Little Rock.

When he came down he would get there around nine at night, still smelling like the houses, and we would sit on Nikki’s front steps for a little while before we went in.

He would eat whatever I had saved him and tell me about the birds, and I would tell him Bo’s numbers.

Those nights on the steps were the best part of my day. The duplex had a crepe myrtle out front that dropped pink blooms on everything, and somebody down the street always had a radio going, and the air was so thick you could feel it on your arms at ten o’clock at night.

When I did see her, she was nice. I mean that. She left coffee in the pot. She asked about Bo every single night.

One evening she came to the hospital after work and stood at the window of his room in her scrubs and cried, and I loved her for it.

At the end of every week she would say, kind of light, “I’m up to a hundred seventy-five, just so you know.”

She said it like she was telling me the weather. I would nod and thank her for the couch, and that was it.

At five weeks Bo came off the breathing mask onto the little nose prongs. At six weeks he took his first bottle and drank eight milliliters and fell asleep on my chest like he had climbed a mountain.

The nurse, a woman named Gina from Conway, took a picture of us on my phone.

At seven weeks he had a bad night. His heart rate kept dropping when he ate, and they put the feeding tube back, and I stood in the hallway and called Tyler at the houses at two in the morning.

He drove down right then. He got there at four and sat with me in the parking deck on the tailgate till the sun came up.

That was the only night I ever said a word about the money. We were sitting out there on the tailgate and I said, “I don’t know how we’re going to pay Nikki.”

Tyler said, “We’ll pay her.” I said, “I know we will. I just don’t know how.”

He said, “You want me to say something to her?” And I said no, because she was family, and because we had said yes, and because I did not have it in me to fight anybody but the monitor right then.

He let it go. He put his arm around me and we watched the helicopter come in.