The Diaper Box at the River Picnic

Bo did not know what to do. He was one. He looked at the flame like it was the most interesting thing in the world, and he reached for it, and I pulled the cake back an inch.

Everybody started singing. Nikki was still holding him in her lap.

When the song ended, Nikki leaned her face down next to his. “Like this, buddy,” she whispered. “Watch Aunt Nikki.” She puffed her cheeks out big and blew, soft, and Bo copied her and blew a little spit bubble, and the two of them together put that candle out.

Everybody clapped. Bo clapped too, because everybody was clapping. And I stood there holding the cake with both hands, and I looked at my sister with my son in her lap and her mascara all down her face, and I had to look up at the shelter roof for a minute so I would not drop it.

The baby who weighed two pounds and nine ounces. The baby who forgot to breathe forty times a day. He was sitting under a big open sky by the river with blue icing on his chin, and my sister was the one who taught him how to blow out a candle.

I don’t know how to say it any plainer than that.

Nikki left about five. She hugged Mama for a long time at her car. She hugged Tyler and said something to him I didn’t hear.

She hugged me last, and she said, “I’ll call you.” I said okay. The diaper box was on the passenger seat of her car with the seat belt across it.

Then about three weeks later I got a letter in the mail. It was an envelope from the Ronald McDonald House in Little Rock.

Inside was a card, the kind they send when somebody makes a gift. It said a donation of $1,525 had been made in honor of Bo Pope.

At the bottom, in Nikki’s handwriting, she had written, “For the next family on the waiting list. Love, Aunt Nikki.” I read it standing at the mailbox at the end of our road with the dog jumping on my legs, and I read it again, and I walked back up the driveway with it held against my shirt.

I called her from the porch steps. She answered on the first ring. I said, “Nikki.” And she said, “I know. Don’t make it a thing.”

So I didn’t. We talked about Bo’s teeth instead. He was getting four at once and chewing on everything in the house.

Before we hung up she said, “Hey. You still work Fridays?” I said Fridays were my busiest day, all my ladies want their hair done for the weekend.

My mother kept Bo most Fridays but she had started working at the school cafeteria and it was getting hard on her.

Nikki said her office had gone to four ten-hour days, Monday to Thursday. She said, “I’m off every Friday now. What if I came up every other Friday and kept him? I’d drive up Thursday night and stay with Mama.”

I said that’s two hours each way. She said, “I know how far it is, Sierra.”

So that is what she did. The first Friday she showed up at our place at seven in the morning with a bag of groceries and a stack of board books she had found at a yard sale.