The Diaper Box at the River Picnic

Just tips. I figured my tips were the extra, and the couch was the extra, and the two should meet.

Tyler saw what I was doing and didn’t say a word about it. The next Saturday he went and asked his boss for weekend shifts on the houses, cleaning out between flocks, and every Saturday after that he came home and put cash in the box without telling me how much.

The box filled slow. Fives and ones, mostly. A twenty from a man who said I was the only one in Franklin County who could fix what his wife did with the kitchen scissors.

A fifty from the mother of a bride I did in October, who cried when she saw her girl’s hair.

Through all of it, Nikki never asked about the money again. Not one time. She texted on Bo’s two-month and three-month and six-month birthdays, little pictures of balloons.

She sent a package at Christmas with a stuffed fox in it. I thanked her every time, and I meant it every time.

But I did not tell her about the box. I did not tell anybody but Tyler. And I will be honest with you, because somebody reading this will think it and they will be right: part of me was saving that money to make a point. Not all of me. But part.

Bo grew. By Christmas he was holding his head up and laughing at the dog. By January he was rolling over, which is late for a full-term baby but right on time for a twenty-nine weeker, because you count them from their due date and not their birthday. The pediatrician called it his corrected age.

In early April I sat down on the edge of my bed with the diaper box and counted it out on the quilt.

It came to $1,410. I put it back and told Tyler. The next Saturday he came home with $115, folded in half, and set it on the dresser without a word.

The night before Bo’s first birthday I counted it again, twice, on the bed. Fifteen hundred and twenty-five dollars, to the dollar.

Sixty-one nights at twenty-five. I made the ones into stacks with rubber bands from the shop. Then I wrote a note on a plain index card.

“Thank you for the couch,” I wrote. “61 nights. Paid in full. We love you. Sierra, Tyler and Bo.” I put the card on top of the money inside the box and folded the flaps shut and ran a strip of packing tape across them, and I sat there a long time looking at it.

We had Bo’s party at the river park on the Arkansas River, at the open shelter with the picnic tables down by the water. My mother had reserved it in January.

She said a boy who started life in a box with holes in the sides deserved a whole sky over his first birthday, and I could not argue with that.

It was the second Saturday in April, and the day was so bright it hurt your eyes. The river was high and wide from the spring rains and moving fast, and the redbuds were done blooming but the dogwoods were out up the hill, and there was a breeze off the water that kept everybody comfortable.

Tyler and I got there an hour early to set up. He tied a few blue balloons to the end of the picnic table, and the breeze kept bumping them against the posts.