The Shower Held by the River

December

Our daughter was born on December eighteenth, at eleven minutes after four in the morning, in the hospital at Ahlers, with Mitch holding one leg and a nurse named Tess holding the other.

She was seven pounds even, and she had her father’s jaw. We named her Ellie Loretta, over Loretta’s loud and sincere objections.

Mitch drove home with the car seat in the back, so slowly that a log truck passed us twice. The cradle was waiting by our bed, where it had been since the shower, with Loretta’s yellow blanket folded in the bottom.

Rosalie came that week with a ham. Fritz and Jenna came with a diaper cake. Half the Hollis side came through our front room in two days, each of them holding Ellie for exactly as long as I allowed.

Donna did not come. She did not call. I will not tell you that did not hurt, because it did. Mitch drove out to her place twice and sat in the truck in her driveway, and both times the curtain moved and the door stayed shut.

“She’s not ready,” he said the second time.

“I know.”

“I’ll keep going.”

“I know you will.” I put my hand on his arm. “The porch light’s on over here, Mitch. It stays on.”

That is all I will say about Donna, and I mean it kindly. The door is not locked. Whenever she is ready to turn it over, she will find out where it opens.

Quiet landing

I went back to the line in the spring. The women all said I was crazy, that I should stay home with her, and they were probably right.

But I like standing beside them, still. I like the cold air and the stainless steel and fourteen women who counted out their gas money for me.

Last month, Tonya came to my door with a box wrapped in the newspaper comics. Inside was a second pair of tiny white boots, a size bigger.

“She’ll grow into them,” Tonya said.

“She will.”

I put them on the shelf beside the first pair, next to the picture of the shelter in November with its plank roof and its row of crockpots and the river brown and wide behind it.

In the photograph there are forty-some people standing under that roof, with the cherry cradle in front and the Kroger cake behind it. Every one of them is looking down at a tiny cream sweater, and every one of them is smiling.

The cake still has my crooked blue writing on it, if you hold the picture close. Welcome Baby Girl, from the ones who showed up.

That was the day I learned what a family is. It is not who books the hall. It is who shows up when the hall is gone.