The Paycheck I Handed My Mother

I asked her one afternoon how things were at the plant.

“Fine,” she said, which meant they were not.

“Did Vance say anything?”

“Not to me.” She smoothed the blanket over the top of the isolette. “He’s running your station himself.”

That surprised me. “Himself?”

“Nobody else could keep up with it. He’s on the floor from six to two, then he’s in the office till six doing the paperwork. He looks like death warmed over.”

I did not say anything. I am not proud of how glad that made me for a minute. Then I thought about his bad shoulder and that kitchen order and the man from corporate, and I was less glad.

“Vance’s wife called me,” Mom said.

“What did she say?”

“She asked how the baby was. Then she said, ‘Roz, I heard what happened.’ And then she didn’t say anything else for a while.”

“What did you say?”

“I said the baby was gaining. What else would I say?”

Mom never would talk against family, not even family that had earned it. She just would not do it. I have watched her hold her tongue through funerals and weddings that would have had another woman throwing chairs.

On Saturday afternoon, I took Mallory down to the cafeteria to make her eat something, and Mom sat with Arlo alone. When we came back up, she was in the rocker with her eyes closed and her lips moving.

She was praying. She does not do it out loud, and she does not do it where people can see, as a rule. But she was doing it there with her hand flat on the top of the isolette, and Sylvie had pulled the curtain halfway to give her some room.

We waited in the hall until she was done.

On Sunday she came straight from church in her good navy coat, with her Bible still in her purse. She told us the whole church had prayed for Arlo by name that morning, and Pastor had asked about him after.

“Half the line was there,” she said. “Norbert and his wife. Some of the others. They all asked.”

Then she washed her hands for three minutes, and came over to the isolette, and Sylvie said, “Go ahead, Grandma. He’s had a good day. Put your hand in.”

Mom opened the porthole and slid one finger inside.

She did not stroke him. She had learned that already. She just laid her finger in his palm and held it still.

And Arlo’s whole hand closed around it.

Not a little curl, the way it had been with me. All the way. His tiny fingers wrapped around her finger and held on, and the number on the heart monitor slowed down, steady and even.

Mom did not move. She did not move for twenty minutes. Her arm must have ached from holding it at that angle, but she stayed there, bent over in her church coat, and nobody in the room said a word.

Finally she whispered, so low I almost missed it, “He knows me.”

Mallory put her face in her hands. Sylvie found something to do on the other side of the room. And I went out into the hall and looked at the ceiling again for a while.