The Shower Held by the River

Why I did not call the whole county

People ask me about this part, so I will say it plainly. Everybody on Mitch’s side had been told by Donna, in her own voice, that I had changed my mind. Aunt Rosalie knew. His cousins in Ahlers knew. The ladies from the Sunday school class knew. I never had the guest list, because she had held it.

If I called forty relatives to say that his mother had lied, I would not be correcting a story. I would be the girl from the wrong end of the county, calling grown women to tell them Donna Hollis was a liar.

I know exactly how that call goes. I would sound young and wounded. She would sound calm. So I did not call them. I called her, once, that same night, from the edge of the bed with my hand under my belly.

“Donna, the Legion said you canceled the hall.”

“Well, honey,” she said, in the sweet voice she saves for the pastor and the mailman, “you told me you were worn out. I only passed it along.”

“I never said that.”

“I’m sure you don’t remember. It’s a hard time. Your mind goes everywhere.” There was a pause, and I could hear her television in the background.

“Okay,” I said. That was all I said. I hung up and sat there with the phone warm in my hand, and the baby turned over under my ribs like she was asking what I planned to do about it.

I did not know yet. I had no plan. I had a shift to get through in the morning and a husband a state away.

Mitch

My husband is named Mitch, and at the time he drove a grain truck for a co-op out of Sturgis. In November that means long runs. He was hauling corn down to a mill in Tennessee that week, and he would not be back until Friday night.

I could have called him. A man will pull a truck over for his wife. But I knew my husband, and I knew what that call would do. He would drive four hours angry, and he would walk into his mother’s kitchen with his jaw set, and she would meet him with her hand over her heart.

She would cry. She would say she only wanted peace. She would ask what kind of wife turns a man against his mother in the last weeks before the baby.

I have watched her do it to his brother. She is very good. So I held it for a day, which is how I came to cry in the break room on Thursday.

The break room

I had made it through the first hour of my shift. We work a deboning line, forty feet of stainless steel belt and cold air and women standing side by side with knives, and when you stop your hands it feels like stopping a heartbeat.

I did not mean to cry. But Thursday was the day Donna’s picture showed up on someone’s Facebook, at a church supper in a green cardigan, with a caption about how blessed she was to be a grandmother soon.

I had my face in my hands and my hairnet crooked when Lucille sat down next to me. Lucille has eleven years on the line and a laugh like a screen door. She did not ask what was wrong. She had already heard from Tonya.

Valerie came over next. Valerie is fifty-two and has opinions about everything, including how I hold my knife. She sat on my other side and said, “Well, that’s a low thing to do.”

Wendy, who runs the packing end, pulled a chair around backward. Then Loretta came in from the wash station and stood at the end of the table.

Loretta is sixty-one. She has stood at that belt for thirty-four years. She is small and gray and she never raises her voice, and when she speaks the whole line leans in the way cows lean toward a feed truck.

She did not say a word at first. She walked around the table, and she put her hand flat on my belly, the way you check a stove to see if it’s still hot.

The baby kicked her palm. Loretta smiled with her mouth closed. “I lost a girl in 1989,” she said. “Seven months along. I never had a shower for her. Then I never had a shower for anything.”

Nobody said anything. “Nobody does that to a girl on my line,” Loretta said. “Not while I’m standing here.” I tried to tell her it was fine. I said I would just wait for the baby to come, and we would have a quiet Christmas, and it would blow over.

“It won’t blow over,” Wendy said. “It’ll sit on you like a wet dog.” Loretta looked around the table.

“Saturday,” she said. “Two o’clock. The shelter at the river park.”

“Loretta, no.”

“You bring yourself,” she said. “Nothing else.”

“You can’t throw a shower in two days.”

“We get thirty minutes for break and fourteen of us on the line,” Loretta said. “I’ve raised four kids and buried a husband in less time than that.”