At eight weeks and five days, Bo passed his car seat test. That is where they strap the baby into his own car seat for an hour and a half and watch to see if his breathing and his oxygen hold steady sitting up.
He slept through the whole thing like an old man in church.
We took him home on a Thursday, the first hot week of summer. Sixty-one days after he was born. He weighed four pounds and fifteen ounces.
Gina walked us to the elevator and hugged me and told Bo to go be loud somewhere else.
We stopped by Nikki’s on the way out of town to get the rest of my clothes. She came out to the truck and leaned in the window and looked at Bo in his car seat for a long time.
“Hey, little man,” she said. “You come back and see your Aunt Nikki.”
Then she said, “Y’all drive safe. Text me when you get home. We’ll settle up whenever, don’t even worry about it.”
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I thanked her for the couch. We pulled out and got on the interstate going west, and I watched Little Rock get smaller behind us.
Two weeks later came the text with the total, and two days after that came the post.
I read them both on that same tailgate in that same parking deck, and I could not tell you which one hurt worse.
It was not the money. I want to say that clearly. Twenty-five dollars a night was fair for lights and water, and I had agreed to it.
It was the post. It was my sister putting a picture of that couch on the internet for our whole family to see, and calling it a gift.
Everybody who liked that post thought she had taken us in for free. Our aunt commented, “You are an angel, Nikki.” A girl from her high school class wrote, “Your sister is so lucky to have you.”
Our mother put a heart on it. Our mother did not know about the twenty-five dollars. Nobody did.
On the drive home from the eye doctor, Tyler asked me what I was going to do. I said I was going to pay her.
He said, “And then what?” I said I did not know yet. He said, “Just don’t do it mad. Whatever you do.” I have thought about that a lot since.
I went back to the shop when Bo was eight weeks home. That was earlier than the pediatrician liked, but my mother had come to stay with us for a while, and our insurance had a deductible that did not care how tired I was, and I had a chair and a book of clients that would not wait forever.
The first day back I did eleven heads. I pumped in the back room between a color and a perm with the door locked and a towel over the window.
My feet were so swollen by six o’clock I drove home in my socks. But I came home with $94 in tips folded in my apron pocket.
That night I took an empty box of diapers off the stack in Bo’s closet, the size-one box, plain brown with no store name on it because I’d bought them at the wholesale club in Fort Smith.
I emptied the last few diapers into his drawer. I put the $94 in the bottom.
That box went on the top shelf of my closet. Every tip I made went in it. Not my paycheck, because the paycheck went to the light bill and the hospital.