The Diaper Box at the River Picnic

I put on a white T-shirt because it was the only thing I owned that Bo had not spit up on that week.

Tyler had on a gray T-shirt and his good jeans. He had trimmed his beard that morning for the first time in a month. He took Bo out of the car seat and held him on his hip, in the little blue romper my mother had bought him, and walked him down to look at the water.

People started coming around two. Tyler’s parents and his brother. Two of my ladies from the shop. A couple from church with their twins.

My mother was coming last, because she was picking up the cake from the bakery in town, and she does not trust anybody else to carry a cake.

Nikki got there at two-thirty. She had driven up I-40 from Little Rock that morning. She came across the grass in a pink tank top and white shorts with her blonde highlights pulled back and her sunglasses pushed up on her head, carrying a gift bag with tissue paper sticking out.

She hugged me. She kissed Bo on the top of his head where his hair was coming in and said he had gotten so big, and she was right.

She said hey to Tyler and gave him a quick side hug around the baby. Then she set her gift bag on the table and said, “Okay, put me to work. What can I do?”

I picked up the diaper box from the end of the table. My heart was going so hard I could feel it in my ears.

Tyler came around to the far side of the table and stood there with Bo held up against his chest, facing out. I could see him from the corner of my eye.

I slid the box across the picnic table to her. I held on to it with both hands until she reached for it.

She was calm. She put both her hands on it and said, “Oh, y’all already got me something? It’s his birthday, not mine.”

“It’s not a present,” I said. I said it quiet. Nobody else was close enough to hear. “It’s the couch. It’s the 61 nights. Thank you for having us, Nikki. I mean that. We’re all paid up.”

She looked at me. Then she looked down at the box in her hands. She did not open it. She did not set it down.

She just held it, very still, with her thumbs on the tape, and her face did not change at all for what felt like a long time.

That is when my mother came up the hill from the parking lot. She came under the shelter roof saying, “Somebody come take this cake, my arms are about to fall off,” and Tyler’s brother took it from her and set it at the other end of the table.

Mama looked at the three of us standing there. She looked at the box in Nikki’s hands. She knows both her daughters better than we know ourselves, and she knew something was wrong before anybody said one word.

“Nikki,” she said. “What’s in the box?”

Nobody answered right away. The balloons bumped against the post. Down on the river a barge was coming up slow, pushing against the current, and you could hear its engine all the way up at the shelter.

Nikki looked at the box. Then she looked at Bo, who was reaching for her sunglasses. Then she looked at our mother, and I saw her decide something.